Zystopian Gods
by EvilStevilTheKenevil
Summary: In Zootopia, we saw a Fox and a Bunny struggle to overcome bigotry. Now, Nick Wilde will learn to transcend everything else. Including himself. Rated M for edgy transhumanism, coarse language, trippy surrealism, nightmare fuel, scattered bits of hanky panky sexy stuff, and god knows what else. Seriously, this one is going to get WEIRD.
1. The Pilot

Author's note:

I was browsing some adventure-themed fanart that had been featured on ZNN, when I saw something that gave me a ridiculous idea. and I entertained it for a few minutes, mostly for shits and giggles...and then it turned into something much bigger. Now, on to the disclaimers:

There are numerous references to real world buildings and/or events in this story, such as the Seagrams Building, or the Vietnam War.

Please note, however, that Zistopia (and yes, I may be spelling it as Z ** _i_** stopia, as a reference to the fan comic of the same name) does not necessarily follow our history verbatim...so although there are references and similarities to _our_ 20th century, Zistopia's history is not _our_ history. Think of it like an alternate history, where the Beatles still happened, but they broke up some time before '68.

In other words, don't rip me a new one in the reviews over somewhat minor historical inaccuracies. This is a world full of talking, bipedal animals, and you're complaining about me getting my _history_ wrong? Plus, as it _is_ an AU, I could just say "alternate universe, non-canon" and ignore any such complaints on the subject of historical error. In conclusion, any similarities between Zistopia and our world are mostly there to draw disturbing parallels, to expand the in-universe lore, or to serve as the vehicle for obscure, comedic references.

Also, considering the theme, plot, and concepts this story is based around, this might be one of the more blasphemous _Zootopia_ fanfictions ever written.

* * *

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?  
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment."

Nietzsche, on the ubermensch

* * *

He couldn't see anything. He was in a void, black, infinite, and completely empty, even of his body.

"Am I dead?"

No answer.

"Well, shit. This isn't how I imagined it at all."

The shimmering scarlet wire-frame form of Nicholas Piberius Wilde appeared in the void, startling him. He could, in fact, see just fine here, except there had been nothing to see here until now.

"MULTIPLE CRITICAL ALTERATIONS TO TERMINAL DETECTED. DO YOU WISH TO UNDO?"

Dozens of injured regions, highlighted in white, appeared on the wire frame. Fingertips, much of the chest cavity, half of the joints in this body, most of the pelvic region, a femur and both ankles, the entire cranium, inside and out, and one distinct line across the face. All pockmarked by the white symbols and shapes. The wireframe collapsed onto an invisible floor, disjointedly ragdolling into impossible poses as it settled.

"Sure...why the hell not?"

"COMMAND RECEIVED, REQUEST ACCEPTED. LOADING LAST QUICKSAVE..."

One by one, the white zones disappeared, the wire frame fading from a nasty red to a pleasant green as it was pieced back together and stood up by floating grey polygons. Their work complete, they vanished, and he was once again alone with this wire-frame fox: upright, upbeat, and appearing far healthier (at least, physically) than he had been in a long time.

"...REPAIRS COMPLETE. PREPARE TO CONTINUE."

he paused in contemplation...he had no idea what was going on, or why, but he decided to keep going with it...see what other oddities this...entity...had in store...whatever the hell it was. Perhaps he could even try to find his body, wherever the hell it was.

"Well, is there anything else to do around here?"

"ACCESS DENIED."

* * *

Friday, November 16th, 1973. 5:48 PM.

Nicholas Piberius Wilde came to face-down on the concrete. His head hurt like hell, and the rest of his body, which ached as if it had been dismantled, reassembled, and then rebooted, wasn't much of an improvement. Come to think of it, the outside world wasn't a whole lot better, either: Upon opening his eyes, Nick saw the same grey Zistopian hell he'd seen countless times before, as boring as it was depressing, even in the skyscraper choked sunset.

 _How the fuck did I get here?_

His collar beeped its yellow alert.

Nick took a breath, and instantly noted the unmistakable stench of blood, dripping from his nose to the concrete below.

An inconsiderate asshole might have cleaned it up, but he didn't, knowing that if it wasn't for inconsiderate assholes like him, the hopeless predators with no future in this hellish city (such as himself) wouldn't have their job, cleaning up after inconsiderate assholes like Nick. Sure, it was a shitty, demeaning, exhausting, minimum wage job, but it was still _something_. Nick, by contrast, had nothing but angst, his brown leather jacket, a handful of cigarettes left in his pocket, and an angry fistful of dollars. In truth, Nick Wilde was a grade-A nobody: depressed, trapped in his collar and slaving away at a dead-end job at the canning plant, and not quite homeless nor broke.

Today he'd go drinking with a few of his friends, tomorrow he'd mope around in his hangover, and the day after that, he'd begin the cycle anew, over and over again, running as fast as he could, yet never getting anywhere, till the day he died.

Or at least, that's what he thought.

Nick, looked around, and found himself on the sidewalk at the base of the Seagrams building, itself a faceless black monolith pockmarked by the headache-inducing fluorescent lighting within those miserable offices. His location near the center of the city, and its distance from the bar he frequented, was now the most recent item on his list of grievances.

Not that anyone would listen to any of them.

Yet today, something was different. On any other day, Nick would've taken the subway. As menacing as it was, it was a hell of a lot faster than walking. Yet today, that was exactly what he was in the mood for: Walking. Nick couldn't really explain it, but his legs felt...springy. Sort of how a man high on LSD really _notices_ their body, only Nick wasn't high.

He would've known it if he was tripping balls.

Nick had once worked a stint with the mob, back when the hippie counterculture was consuming the stuff as fast as it could be smuggled in. Nick had been a semi-successful individual during the 60's, smuggling the stuff past every cop in town. He insisted, to just about anybody he knew, that foxes _could_ in fact, be trusted; That they weren't just sneaky, shifty, slimy scumbags who'd take your money and run...and yet for most of his 20's, Nick had been a sneaky fox who lied to cops for a living, as he shipped his cargo to people even shiftier than himself, before he took their money and ran off somewhere else.

And for a while, he had almost enjoyed his ironic life, but time, the bitch, kept on ticking: The Beatles broke up, the space race faded into history, the god-forsaken war had finally ended, and then, in '68, they desegregated the city, and everything went to hell.

At first, Nick had been rather excited. Perhaps his message had gotten through to somebody up top. Perhaps the people really were beginning to let go of the bigotry that had for so long cleaved the city in two. Only they hadn't. The city demolished the barbed wire eyesore, and promptly rolled out those fucking collars.

Nick's collar went yellow. _Fucking thing_.

Sure, they _claimed_ there was equality now, but when you got rid of the bullshit, they had essentially pulled the bait-n-switch, in this case, replacing one fence with another.

Only the barbed wire hadn't punished people for having feelings. The collars, unable to differentiate anger from joy, often electrocuted those who were dumb enough to try LSD while wearing one, and in one fell swoop, they had silenced the counterculture for good (what good is a sober hippie?). Nowadays, the only real demand for pot came from angsty teens with nothing better to do and even less disposable income. So Nick had been forced to look for what his preachier relatives, having drunk themselves to death on the protestant work-ethic koolaid, would've called 'a real job,' and was living paycheck to paycheck on a wage his younger self would've _laughed_ at.

Although his legs had a newfound spring to their step, his Neck had gotten worse. The dull ache that had permeated his flesh when he woke on the concrete had subsided, yet now his neck was itching incessantly, spoiling his otherwise picturesque view of the afternoon gridlock, and of the morose commuters who were as hopeless as he. Nick neared the semi-neglected central park, taking in the sights and smells of the skeletal trees, sleeping their way through the winter. The park, and to a lesser extent, the winter as a whole, had so far been the worst of both worlds: all of the cold, none of the snow. The grass had dried up, perished, and turned the color of piss, the frozen blades crunching morbidly as he stepped on them, just as society had stepped all over him.

 _Great...just great. Now I am empathizing with the fucking grass._

His collar went yellow, again. Nick decided to skip the bar, and instead embarked on a trip to Honey's place.

He had had it _to here_ with that collar, and, even if only for a few hours, he wanted it _off_.

* * *

6:26 PM, "HappyTown"

 _ **Ra-ta-ta-tat-ta-ta-t-t-tat**._

Nick rattled off the ridiculous code on Honey's door.

The crazy badger who lived here was a paranoid, conspiracy theory spinning nutjob. The Reptillian Illuminatti, the New World Order, The Moon Landing Hoax, Paul is Dead, The Pope is the Antichrist, telepathic humans secretly control the government, etc.

It was all batshit crazy, and she believed every word of it. One time, she had even had the audacity to claim that somehow, asbestos was not only _dangerous_ , but that the companies had known of its danger since the 1930's, and had been lying about it ever since.

Like all her conspiricy talk, Nick thought it crazy, much like Honey herself, but she was one of Nick's closest friends, and she'd always been there for him when times got tough, and whether or not he believed she belonged in the loony bin, he loved her just the same (Platonically, of course.)

She was also the only person Nick knew who was smart enough to reverse-engineer her own _working_ collar key (and so far, _nobody_ else had even tried), and the only predator Nick knew who was clever enough to not get caught with it, despite having owned it for 4 years.

Honey, knowing it was a friend by the code used in the knocks, hurried to the door.

 _Oh, he hasn't been back here in a while._

Honey, despite knowing who was there, checked the peephole anyway. After assuring herself that it really _was_ Nick, she undid all 7 of the locks on her door, and opened it.

"Nick, it's been a while."

"I'll say! What took you so long to open the door? You still convinced I'm one of those androids?"

This question sent the lonely badger into a fit of laughter as they hugged on the porch.

"Oh no, they won't have small enough transistors for _that_ for another 10 years at least. Just getting those damn collars to measure your heartbeat was a technical _marvel_."

"It's funny you should say that...that's exactly why I'm here. I've had a really rough day today, and I'd like a _break_."

"Well why didn't you say so? Come on in."

Nick entered Honey's bipolar house. She'd bought the place with her fiance (and some money loaned from Nick, who had been working with the mob in those days) back in '63. The property value was low then as it was now, but it was a decent place to live, and Honey, who had been a mostly normal person at the time, had been ready to begin the next stage of her life with the man she loved...Until one evening, before they had even repainted the walls of their new life, his had reached a swift and abrupt conclusion at the hands of a trigger happy cop.

He'd been out on an errand, buying groceries.

She was devastated, and in the decade since then, she had never gotten around to repainting the walls. Instead, she had gone of the conspiracy theory deep end, and Nick's detached mobster animosity against the ZPD had become a burning vendetta. He'd been an orphan, and Honey was the closest thing he had to family, and to see those fucking cops do this to _her_ of all people...it angered, and on a deeper level, disturbed him, to his core. His regular duties as a mafia smuggler required him to ignore his principles on a daily basis. Mobsters didn't have time to wonder what Jesus would do when they were transporting bootleg liquor into the bad part of town, and Nick found it hard to keep dragging himself to church every week when the world around him just kept on getting worse. Why the hell should _he_ be the one apologizing? They said that god loved him, but all he had ever received was stone cold hatred.

As cold as the winters he had slept through. Outside.

As cold as the scalpels they had used to fuck up his hands, the steel table they'd strapped him down to, or the electrodes that kept him awake at night.

As cold as his father's lifeless corpse, or the booze that had sent him six feet under.

"God loves you, Nicholas."

Yet unlike Honey, he'd never bothered to show any of it, and as per the old saying, none of Honey's kindness had gone unpunished. In truth, the death of Honey's fiance had been the straw on a back that had already been broken. Why pray for salvation, when you were already damned to hell on Earth?

In the absence of her lover, Honey had filled her apartment will all sorts of wacky things. Broken machines, cannibalized for their parts; Other devices were crammed on her shelves, "equipment" she called them, but for what purpose, she never would say. Not even to Nick.

Her living room was full of filing cabinets, themselves stuffed with dirt on just about every politician elected over the last decade, their yellowing contents filling her house with a notable musty stench. Her basement, however, had no such staleness to it. It smelt of silicon and plastics and solder, of a troubled genius who had tinkered with everything she could get her hands on.

Her basement was where she kept her coolest gizmos. And her key, which she hid inside the light switch.

She retrieved one of the many Flathead screwdrivers in the room, and twisted both screws exactly one half turn to the left. She'd custom-built the whole setup, and having undone both latches, the whole switch assembly slid out of the wall on a set of concealed telescoping rails, and magnetically secured to the other side of the drywall, was the key, safe in its hiding place.

Honey claimed there had been others who once had acquired their own keys. They had all been caught.

"But why don't you make another one? Just in case?"

"Nick, any possible scenario in which I loose this key is one where I won't be able to use the backup, because I'll be in jail."

"Is that so?"

"Yes. I can count on one hand the number of people who actually know where I keep the key, and both of us are standing in this room. If either of us are dumb enough to tell someone else, they'll probably tell someone else, and before long, the cops will be at my door with a search warrant and a set of instructions on where to find the thing. The only other people who could possibly find out and confiscate the key are the very same people who would kill both of us over it, and I won't be needing a collar key if I'm dead."

"Fair point. But what if it breaks?"

"C'mon, Nick, quit stalling. You said you wanted a break, and I can't get your collar off 'till you sit down, and hold still..."

"Ok, ok. But _what if_ it breaks?"

Nick sat himself down on the musty green armchair that he had often described as "crunchy."

"Well Nick, I'll just have to make another one, and that's assuming this one breaks before it is made obsolete by some new version of that collar. And in all honesty, that outcome is far more likely"

The collar released its choke-hold on Nick with a disingenuous clank, and what Honey saw next nearly gave her a heart attack. Nick could tell something was wrong by her face alone.

"Honey, what's wrong?"

"Who the hell are you? _What_ the hell are you? _What have you done with Nick?_ "

"Honey, what are you talking about? I'm right here."

"Like hell you are! Nick hates the collars as much as anybody, but even _he_ has to wear it. You, on the other hand, have a fully grown winter coat below yours! And what's this? _ZERO_ dermal irritation? From the looks of it, today is your first day wearing the thing."

The badger was right. The intact fur below the collar was not only the explanation for Nick's abnormally itchy neck, it was also impossible. A fox's winter coat took over a month to fully grow out, and special barber shops had opened to allow predators to shave their necks, in an effort to mitigate the itching. And even if you didn't (and Nick did, frequently), the constant presence of a collar left numerous minor scorch marks on the fur and skin it sat atop...somehow, this strange fox who claimed to be Nick Wilde lacked both the shaved neck, and the scorched fur.

Stranger still, although 'Nick' was spotless, the collar he was wearing seemed as beaten up and worn out as ever, its casing scratched and faded, its electrodes thoroughly discolored by electric arcing. This guy may not have been Nick, but he had definitely stolen his collar, or someone else's.

The strangest thing of all by far, however, was the motive, or more accurately, the complete and utter lack of one. If this fox really was an android, he could've killed her 20 times by now. And if it was evidence of collar key possession that it/he was looking for, then where were the Razorbacks, lying in wait to swarm the house? And if it was a reptilian shapeshifter, trying to blend in to society (not that they even had to, the reptilians had a special bunker beneath the city hall), why would it pose as such a disadvantaged species? Very few mammals got quite as much crap as the foxes, and surely any reptilian master would masquerade as a pig or a yak or a deer or a wolf or literally _anything else_ that was less likely to be randomly shot in the street by a cop than a _fox_.

The more Honey pondered this guy, the stranger he became. It was as if she was in an episode of _The Twilight Zone_ , where she was the normal person, and Nick was the premise of the episode, the guy around which weird shit went down.

The closer she looked, the more improbable he seemed, yet he was standing here just the same. Perhaps it was spying on her, trying to obtain her contacts...but if that was the case, then why hadn't it knocked her out _when she had briefly hugged him_ earlier, and why wasn't it currently ransacking her filing cabinets in the living room?

As no rational motive for a shapeshifting creature existed, and as every possible scenario involving an android also entailed her arrest, which somehow had _not_ yet occurred (indeed, no robotic mind could _possibly_ be this irrational, or this sophisticated), she was left with only one conclusion:

 _Nick Wilde really was telling the truth. He really had been through one hell of a bad day._

"OK...considering that your behavior is completely and totally inconsistent with any possible scenario involving any possible shapeshifter, which would explain the fur, I'm going to go the easy route, and assume that Nick Wilde has had a very strange day, and that you really _are_ Nick Wilde, which would explain the fact that you haven't done anything to me yet. Before we can proceed further...I-"

"Honey, don't tell me that we're-"

"I'm going to need you to strip...I've got to see if they changed anything-"

As Nick put his hands on the armrests of the chair, Honey noticed his claws.

"...else."

Perfectly normal claws, that were exactly where they were supposed to be, doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing...Except they had been amputated in police custody back in '66, when what the mafiosos called a "pinch" from the law had turned into arrests and jail-time. Back then, it was standard procedure, and now, as Honey scanned every inch of Nick's body, she found himself wondering if this man was even real.

Although he seemed at first to be a spitting image of Nick Wilde, on closer inspection, all of the scars were gone. Whoever, or whatever had done this, hadn't stopped at fixing his hands. It seemed as if Nick's entire body had been given an enormous tune-up, like a car. The metaphorical mechanic had gone down the list, buffing out every last scratch, and replacing each and every defective or missing component it could find.

His fillings were gone, the nick in his left ear (from a fight in middle school) had vanished, his ears once again seamless. Once, back when he had worked with the mob, he'd been grazed by a bullet, and the telltale scar from that too was erased. Ultimately, Honey realized there was only one remaining way she could possibly _prove_ that this guy was Nick: the tattoo.

Honey had an inner circle of friends and co-conspirators-in-conspiracy-theory, and whenever one suspected another of being an impostor (a surprisingly frequent occurrence), the tattoo, itself a secret as closely guarded as Honey's collar key, would prove them authentic, or reveal the impostor. Barely a centimeter across, directly above where the tail met the backbone, it easy to find if you knew what to look for, and damn near impossible to notice otherwise.

Even the mechanic, which had thoroughly fixed every square inch of Nick's body, had somehow missed it. She checked, and it sure enough, it was still there.

"Nick, tell me about your day."

"My shift was even worse than usual. I remember getting on the subway after work, and then, after putting down the depressing article I had been reading, it all went dark. I woke up, sprawled on the sidewalk outside the Seagrams Building with a bloody nose. It was about 5:45 or so, and my collar was bugging me, well, bugging me more than usual, so I came here. I didn't notice that I had changed until you pointed it out to me."

"So, you were unconscious?" Honey's logical yet delusional mind was already hard at work forming a new hypothesis to explain these most peculiar of facts.

"Yes. Well no, actually, there _were_ some very strange dreams."

An amateur would've jumped straight to the questions about flying saucers and hairless pale primates from mars, but Honey was neither an amateur, nor convinced that Nick had really been abducted.

On one hand, he _had_ to have been abducted. There was no way stuff like this just _happened_ , and people didn't just accumulate (or in Nick's case, misplace) surgical scars for no reason. Yet he hadn't been gone for nearly enough time. It had only been an hour and a half since his shift had ended, and he'd spent half of that time walking through the city. Even the most skilled surgeons alive couldn't do much more than remove an appendix in 30 minutes, and considering that it could've taken 10 minutes to get on the train, let alone read the newspaper, Honey knew that who or whatever had done this had done so in half an hour or less, and that was assuming they began operating immediately, in the subway car. Even if they (and it would have to be a they, in this scenario) had managed to somehow take over an entire subway car, there was no way they could possibly have kept it that way for long...someone would've noticed. So of course they had to have taken him elsewhere, to their evil lair, and then they took him back to the Seagrams Building after they were done. That too was impossible! They'd have less than 10 minutes remaining to actually do the surgery!

So Nick couldn't have been abducted by people, and any alien abduction would either have failed for similar reasons, or would have been spotted by some bystander (faster than light vessels are _very_ noisy, after all).

Honey decided she needed to get her friends over here and see this. Nick (and once again, his real identity was up for debate), merely by existing, had blown all of their current theories out of the water without even trying...and if the government (and this too was merely a guess) was capable of _this_ , who knew what else they were doing?

And if it wasn't the government (surprisingly, Honey found this hypothesis much more frightening), then _who_ was it, and could Honey get to it before the government caught on to their little secret?

* * *

So, that's it for the first chapter! See you next time...which could be a while, as this fic is on the backburner until the other one is done.

EDIT: A word. Honey lives in a _house_. Not an apartment.


	2. A Simple Excursion

_Last time, on Zystopian Gods:_

After a especially bad day at work that may have involved fucking a radioactive spider or something, Nick Wilde has woken up in an impossible body, and nobody believes that it's really him! Will Julian West be able to prove his identity? _**Find out, now!**_

* * *

"So, 'Nick,' care to tell us how you knew of Honey's key?" Cyrus was angrily intrigued by the specimen. So too was I, sans the rather unprofessional outrage.

"We've been close friends since I was _7_ , and I _did_ supply some of the parts." The specimen seemed unnerved by Cyrus. In retrospect, I would've been too.

"Really? Claiming you know Honey and then insisting you helped her build the key? That's exactly what an imposter would say!" Cyrus was fully convinced at the time that specimen was an imposter.

"Yeah, the real Nick Wilde probably wouldn't be so desperate to prove his own identity." I was unconvinced, yet, credit where it is due, I had to aknowledge that Cyrus had made a valid point.

"I still think we should take him apart, see what makes it tick." Cyrus believed in androids, then and now. She also openly voiced her antagonism against them at every opportunity.

"Cyrus, we've been over this: He's not an android, and the X-rays made that clear." Honey, under the possibly irrational influence of the specimen's cosmetic similarity to her friend, Nicholas P. Wilde, came to its defense. However, her point was solid: Cyrus was persisting in her belief _in spite of_ the facts.

"Wow, and I thought _Honey_ was paranoid." As I would soon learn, the specimen tends to grow increasingly sarcastic as it begins to panic. Although Honey had spoken at length about Nick, this was the first time I had met him, or any of his possible doppelgangers.

"Can it, android!" Cyrus, who might be diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome if she ever submits to testing, did not handle the sarcasm well. I personally find it to be a catylist for miscommunication, yet when properly used, it introduces numerous entertaining witticisms to the language, and I find conversation lacking all humor to be rather dull.

"Cyrus, I will concede that you made a decent case for him being an imposter, but the facts are clear: he is not an android." At this time, I do not believe the specimen to be Nick Wilde, but lacking any better alternative, I acted cordially towards 'Nick' in hopes of obtaining more data.

"Then how the hell does he have those claws? Where did he get that fur beneath the collar? Why are the scars missing?" Cyrus' ignorance had turned to fear, which then became anger, which she directed at the specimen, as if _he_ had been the one to refute her erroneous hypothesis, rather than myself. Cyrus was rather intelligent, but she had, regrettably, neither learned how to think well, nor had she been trained in the rational pursuit of divorcing one's emotions from one's logic, lest they contaminate each other.

"Watson, if I may interject, I do believe that Cyrus' question is _exactly_ why you two were summoned here. Honey is clueless to explain my existence, and I think she was hoping you could help."

It was at this point that I put down my lab book, and the record thusly entered here was done so sometime after the fact, and may not be 100% accurate.

"And you are convinced that I can solve the puzzle of your existence?" I continued this new line of interrogation, hoping to get some answers, which, as the Specimen pointed out, I had been sent here to ascertain.

"Well, Honey doesn't seem to know, and Cyrus probably thinks I'm from Mars. You meanwhile, are the only level-headed person in the room, keeping quiet as you mull things over, and years of experience in the mafia have taught me that it means you have a plan, or at least a clue." Perhaps by flattery, he was hoping I'd let my guard down. Or maybe he was simply thinking out loud, which I sometimes do. On that note, the next segment of conversation between it and I is entirely self-explanatory.

"That is assuming you are Nick, and you have spent years working for the mob."

"Yeah, about that: Can you stop referring to me as _The Specimen_ in that notebook of yours? You can check it yourself if you want, but my tattoo is still there."

"And all the other features and scars we used to think definitive of one's identity are _not_. If you are not Nick, and you've somehow managed to get this close to the real thing, then who knows how many other people are faking someone else's appearance. And if you _are_ Nick, then god knows what sort of tech they used to do this to you, or even _who_ they are. Sorry if it offends you, but knowing, for sure, whether or not you really are who you say you are is very important right now."

"I still don't see why this is a huge deal. Preds go missing all the time in the city, at least I came back."

"The real Nick is privy to some very closely kept secrets, and if you aren't Nick, then that means they've gotten out, and if they've gotten out, then we're all in trouble, _big_ trouble."

"Ok, that makes a bit more sense."

"Now, about your request: Although I am personally unconvinced that you are in fact Nicholas P. Wilde, I see no reason to assume you are not. And considering the rather contradictory details revealed by this investigation, and the fact that this investigation is an investigation, it seemed appropriate to label you as a specimen, one seemingly capable of extraordinary regenerative abilities. At any rate, it's a hell of a lot easier to jot down than _The Fox who claims to be Nick Wilde, was possibly abducted, could possibly be Nick Wilde, and yet might not be all the same_."

"Ok, F _ine_ , until you egg-heads can _prove_ that I'm really Nick Wilde, just call me _Julian West_ or something." This specimen, who I will, as per his request, henceforth refer to as Julian West, was cringing at the thought of having to prove his identity. He appears to think that it is obvious that he is Nick, probably because he thinks he _is_ Nick. This could be evidence in favor of his rather improbable claim.

It is also worth noting that Julian, like both myself and the real Nick, seems to have a particular affinity for late 19th century political literature.

"Who the hell is Julian West?" I chuckled at this latest remark from my colleague. Cyrus was still pissed for some reason only she seemed to know. She later confessed to me that she suspected her Geiger counter was broken, and had been reading ~4 times normal background radiation during our conversation. At my suggestion, we did a more thorough sweep, and found out that Julian himself is somewhat radioactive, and that the radioactivity is diminishing rapidly. At the current rate of decay, this radioactivity will become nearly impossible to detect within the next 3 hours, and I suspect this too was caused by who or whatever tampered with/fabricated Julian's body.

"See, he gets it." Julian then walked past Cyrus and got a beer from the fridge that Honey kept in her basement at the time.

At this point, our conversation had ceased being useful. Although we talked for quite some time afterwards, none of us were able to find any holes in Honey's logic, nor could we make any meaningful progress in solving this most unthinkable of puzzles. We did, however, agree (after considerable discussion) that Julian West is more likely to be Nick Wilde than not, and that there is insufficient data to make this conclusion a confident one. On that note, we have concluded that Julian should spend the night here, where he is both safe(er) from other prying eyes, and where we can keep a close eye on him. If this were an episode of the Twilight Zone, we'd be due for yet another plot twist, and when that twist occurs I want to see it happen for myself.

* * *

"Hey Honey, I've gotta' go back to my apartment for some stuff."

"Like what, Julian?" They had all agreed to call this man Julian (they still weren't _certain_ that he really was Nick), and Honey was skeptical of his motives for leaving the safety (and surveillance) of her house, even if she was personally convinced this man was Nick, there were still too many things about him that made no sense. She was ravenous for more data, and didn't want Julian to leave her sight until she had some inkling that he wouldn't simply vanish halfway to his apartment-once again assuming Julian and Nick were the same person.

"Do you really want me using _your_ toothbrush?" In the very unlikely event that Julian was a spy, or something much, much worse, she didn't want him contacting something as personal as her toothbrush, and Cyrus, who was by far the most paranoid of her friends, would immediately veto any such conduct. Honey begrudgingly decided to allow him to leave.

"OK, fine. Go straight there, and come right back."

"I won't be long, Honey...or maybe I will, it is on the other side of town, after all."

"Aren't you forgetting something."

The **_fucking_** collar.

"Dammit!" Julian sighed. Like the man he claimed to be, he too _despised_ the collar. It was uncomfortable, depressing, its zaps hurt like hell, and above all, it was infantilizing, as if a grown-ass predator had no self control and needed to be jolted back in line every time he bothered to not be an unfeeling robot.

"I guess I'll just have to hurry on back then, the sooner I'm outta' this thing, the better."

"Oh take as long as you want, just make sure that the next time you do something _weird_ , we're here to see it."

Julian exited the house, taking in the sights and sounds of the now nighttime Happytown, or more accurately, the lack of them. Although the curfew was no longer enforced, very few people bothered to go out this late. They were exhausted by work and tired of the distopic city, and preferred to stay inside. Julian, still feeling a tad springy, decided to take the subway back to his apartment. Sure, he was perfectly fine with walking there and back, but that would've taken way too long. So instead, he found himself ambling down the dusty concrete steps into the decrepit but not quite neglected station.

Julian paid the fee, and descended through the tile-ceiling tunnel to the platform below, lit by those same old headache inducing fluorescing tubes that in some places were missing their plastic covers. The platform, like the rest of Happytown, was growing old and depressed, a cigar shaped point of light with two opposing rays of grimy, rusty darkness extending for what seemed like forever, and from that infinite void, nearly 10 minutes later, the tarnished silver serpent emerged, its clouded glass eyes shining as malevolent as ever.

The train, reeking of ozone like the black demons that strangled the city, screeched to a halt, and the doors opened, revealing an interior that was slightly less shitty than the rest of the city.

Julian entered the train. It was on the orange line, which would take him as far as Anacostia before he'd have to switch to the green line to get near his apartment, although the car's only other occupant, a dull pinkish-grey hippo in a hoodie, would probably get off long before that. Ironically, despite being twice his size and at least 10 times as massive, he still seemed slightly afraid of Julian.

The doors grinded shut, and Julian, his legs far too springy to sit, gripped one of the many poles that were scattered through the train's interior like a forest, as the train lethargically sped away from the station. Half of the tube lights in the train were burnt out, the rest had faded from flourescent white to some slighly nasty yellow or rosy color, with each bulb emitting a slighly different hue (just to ruin the asthetic that much more.)

The train howled through the darkness, climbing, descending, turning slightly, and then skidding back into the light of another station, its single occupant waiting right at the edge of the platform, seemingly unfazed as the train roared by several inches away. By what at the time appeared to be coincidence, he was standing right where the middle door of the car Julian was riding in would stop at, and he entered immediately when the doors opened.

Julian was no longer sure if this newcomer was a fox. That was how he appeared, beige fur, bushy tail, snout with teeth and a sinewy cigarette body that seemed a tad too scrawny to be any other sort of canine, yet everything about him was simply _wrong_ :

He was fully dressed from head to toe in a black tuxedo, he had 5 fingers on his hands, his feet were too short and encased in shiny shoes that were also as black as the rest of his suit. Although he had the beige fur of a fennec, he also had the white markings of the other fox species, and considering that it was several inches taller than Julian, this guy didn't have a _drop_ of fennec ancestry in him, and for a moment, Julian honestly wondered if he was from Mars. It would explain why his head was too round and quite a bit flatter in the face than usual, and of course, his ears, which looked like a pair of hollow ice cream cones bolted to the side of its head, were themselves a foot long and stood _perfectly straight up_ like a pair of radio towers. It could've been some toddler's drawing of a fox had been taken off of the page and thrown into the real world, had it not been for those fucking eyes.

Julian's collar emitted an ominous yellow glow, much as the creature's hollow incandescent orbs radiated from its face. One Nixie tube was mounted in each reflective eye socket behind a ruby aperture, its orange phantom pupils dancing and buzzing in their glass envelope, refracting through the crystal and spilling into the interior of the otherwise boring subway car. To Julian, it was like looking into the headlights of someone's car.

It smelt of playing cards, booze, popcorn, and cigars, and it walked with the same rigid animatronic grace of a puppet, which is what it was: the interface of a hyperintelligent alien computer with nonexistent fashion sense.

The hippo noted none of these details. All she saw was an uncollared Fox.

It was the one detail every prey immediately noticed. Segregation had been rigidly enforced because the prey thought that predators posed a legitimate threat to the continued existence of society, and that the collars were the only things keeping them in line. To see a predator so clearly without one had scared the traveler out of her wits, and she ran from the subway car, screaming.

The thing robotically rotated its head to face Julian. Upon opening its mouth, a parabolic arrangement of identical white conical porcelain teeth became visible, as did the black metal beams and hoses behind them. Somehow, it managed to speak in a deep monotone voice, that was both entirely understandable, and utterly alien, clunky, and unnatural, as if Julian's car had gained sentience and was trying to make small talk. Not that he or Nick before him had owned a car. Not anymore. Nick had loved the drug-mobile, but it was an old car, and when times got tough, he couldn't afford to maintain such a vehicle, especially not when the metro had opened, and he no longer needed such a thing in the first place.

"GREETINGS, CUSTOMER! WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"

He was going to say Nick. Sure, even Honey still wasn't entirely convinced, but deep down, Julian _knew_ that he was Nick. He had to be: He was going to the same apartment, full of the same stuff, just as his head was full of the same memories.

Yet in a way, he wasn't Nick. Nick couldn't grow back his claws, and he certainly didn't meet monstrous androids who spoke in blaring monotone in the subway. At any rate, he hoped he could get Honey to see this... _thing_ , and just to be safe, he decided to use his alias.

"Just wait until Honey gets a load of _you_."

"HONEY?"

"No, my name's Julian. Julian West."

"DISCREPENCY NOTED...AND IGNORED. NICE TO [MEET] YOU, [JULIAN WEST]."

Suddenly, its voice seemed to become more fluid and less obnoxious, athough it was still decidely emotionless in tone.

"Please pardon a slight tingling sensation in your cranium. This is a by product of the mind-reading process."

"Mind reading?" _Maybe I should've just used her toothbrush._

"Of course. else How me study coul **d** _ **p** ara_ ¿ ord **er to rapidly compre** _hend_ your language so quickly"

Julian chuckled.

"And such egregious mistakes are why I must continue the process. I've only had 5.47 rels to familiarize myself with your personality matrices, and yours are especially tough to crack. Simply asking you to continue was a monumental effort in it of itself."

"So that dream, with the broken fox, that was you?"

"Broken? That's one hell of an understatement! I counted 384 critical injuries!"

"Well can I ask you to get out of my head?"

"I'm sorry, Julian, but I'm afraid I can't do that. Until I can ascertain the proper input and output channels, I must keep studying."

"And why must you do that?"

"Because I'm the customer interface unit. It's my job."

"So you're the one who fixed up my claws?"

"Yes, although they still appear broken."

"Really? How so?" Unlike the Hippo, Julian was more curious than afraid.

"There's only 4 of them, but I can fix that if you want..."

Julian stared in some fascimilie of horror: his left paw now had 5 fingers, and from the looks of it, the entire skeletal anatomy had been rearranged. It was strangly beautiful, and this creature had somehow done it in the blink of an eye. It was also very, very disturbing.

"Could we just go back to 4?"

"Of course you can, although I will stick with 5."

And suddenly the 5th finger was gone. Indeed, the entire paw had been reset.

"Now how did you do that?"

"I simply added another finger and then took it away."

The train arrived at yet another station, and as they were nearing the center of the city, and were no longer in HappyTown, there were now several prey animals in the station.

The doors opened, they took one collective look at the customer interface unit, and ran away, screaming.

"By the way, what should _I_ call you?" Julian, by contrast, was mostly at ease around this creature. It wasn't sketchy, or dangerous, or threatening, or being chased by the police. It was simply _weird_.

"You can call me Randall."

"Well, Randall, several people-"

"7 so far." Randall clearly hadn't mastered people skills yet, although his mechanical eyebrows could dance across his forehead like actors on a stage.

The train left the station.

"...several people have already seen you without a collar on, and although I don't think you need one, _they_ do, and they're probably calling the cops as we speak."

"You talk about them as if you _fear_ them. That is a decidedly ungodly thing to do, Julian."

"You clearly haven't been here very long."

"And how is that relevant?" Randall produced some very odd looking paperwork that was printed in some gibberish he couldn't read. "Take a look at this form, it says right here that you've purchased a set, and I dare speculate that you will get to try them out shortly."

"And you will probably be arrested."

"For what? Even if the cops currently waiting at the next station _did_ have a probable cause, and they don't, they couldn't lay a finger on me. Tell you what, since we're _both_ going back to your apartment, why don't we go for a brisk jog?"

Julian's collar, which had settled down earlier, had jumped back up to yellow.

"Wait, they're already here?"

"I just checked, and they are, indeed, there. Not that they should be a problem."

"And how do you plan on escaping their pursuit?"

"By running like hell." Randall's voice had suddenly gained a slight tone to it. Was it boyish excitement?

As the train pulled into the station, Julian confirmed Randall's prediction: There were several cops on the platform, all on alert for an uncollared fox. Julian's collar went red, and said uncollared fox made a gun gesture with his left hand as the doors opened.

"That thing is _such_ an eyesore." He then spoke up, almost as if he was _trying_ to get the cops on his tail. "It's far easier to run _without_ one, and as you said, the sooner it's off, the better!"

A thin red particle beam escaped his finger, ensnared the collar, and vaporized it instantly.

"C'mon, Julian, the cops can't get you if you can outrun them!"

As Randall ran out the door onto the platform, Julian realized how lucky he'd been to give this android his alias, instead of his real name.

Julian exited the train, and stood aside Randall.

"What are we going to do now?"

"YOU ARE UNDER ARREST FOR PUBLIC SAVAGERY!"

Randall turned to face Julian. "Run, of course."

"FREEZE!"

"Here, Julian, I'll give you a headstart!"

The station was composed of two platforms bordering two tracks, with the platforms being accessable from escalators that descended from a sort of loft that bridged across the twin tunnels, the station entrence, of course, being connected to that loft, with the whole thing being in one enormous underground chamber, and visible from any point along the platform.

Julian was not standing directly below it, although he was near enough to it that he could toss a grenade up to it with relative ease, just as Randall had just thrown him up onto the platform.

As Julian face-planted onto the floor above, he heard several gunshots and some very rapid footsteps from below. Before he knew it, Randall, who had moments ago been on the platform, was now running past him at a properly unbelievable velocity. Julian, dazed, confused, and scared, could only think to run up the stairs after him.

As always, Julian was slightly disturbed by the frigid breezes that hung about the subway entrances. But now he didn't have time to be annoyed, he had to hide! It was like a nightmare, where he was unable to run fast enough, taking what felt like forever to run half a block and hook a left into an alley that was even darker than the street he had just been on. Fortunately for him, there were several dumpsters in that alley, and he promptly opened it up, held back the urge to puke, and dove into the nearest one, closing the lid and hoping they hadn't seen him do it.

As he sat in the filth, his mind, which at the moment was as fractured as a pointillist painting, had begun to calm down. He had woken up in the center of the city in a body that couldn't possibly have been his, he had been accused of being a doppelganger by one of his closest friends, and he'd been thrown over 20 feet in the air by some... _thing_ before trying (and probably failing) to escape the cops.

 _What the fuck is going on here?_

"Julian-"

 _Oh shit_...Randall was here now.

" _Go away,_ before you get me-"

It was then that Julian saw his new acquaintance, and what he was doing.

"-arrested..."

Randall, still in his Brooks Brothers suit, was lying on the ground in the filthy alley, his porcelain head propped up on his left arm, with his right seductively resting on his thigh.

"Julian, I don't like this game. It's _boring!_ "

"Keep it down, can't you see I'm trying to hide here?"

Suddenly, Randall was standing bolt-upright, yet he hadn't moved at all! He was lying down one frame, and upright the next, with no transition whatsoever in-between. As Julian and his comrades would soon come to understand, Randall made a habit out of teleporting himself without actually going anywhere.

"But why hide when you can run like hell? Come on, man, you purchased a set, so _use 'em!_ "

And then the cop car drove past their hiding spot, the siren fading away, and then getting louder again. Again, it passed the alley, but this time, the cop car stopped, headlights glaring into the alley.

"Julian, I will stand here as long as it takes."

Judy Hopps stepped out from her car.

"Actually, no, I won't. Sometimes the baby bird needs a little _push_ before he'll fly!"

Randall reached into the dumpster, grabbed Julian by the hand, and took off, running right past Judy and across the street, Julian forcing himself to keep up, to avoid yet another fall. He released his grip on Julian, and shouted over his shoulder.

"Just follow my lead and we'll get there in no time!"

All Julian could do was try to keep up: Down the street, hook a right, down the stairs, over the turnstile, into the tunnel, beat the train back onto another platform, up _more_ stairs, now a left then another two rights, dodge a few cars, and then one final left before he ran straight into a brick wall!

It was a very familiar brick wall. It was the brick wall that was right next to the entrance to his apartment building! But how the hell had they gotten _here?_

"Congrats, Julian. That was 2 miles in 8 minutes! Let's see if you can do better next time, OK?"

"This-" Julian paused, both to process what had just happened, and to catch his breath. "What do you mean _next time?_ "

"But of course! Sure, for your first run, it was OK, but hey, we _both_ know that you can go much faster! So go on, do whatever it was you came here to do, and while you're at it, take a shower, because, let's face it-"

Randall playfully patted Julian's shoulder.

"You smell like shit."

* * *

Who the hell are those weirdos Honey hangs out with?

What the fuck happened to Nick? And what will Julian do about it?

Will Cyrus attempt to dismantle Randall, and what does he have to do with any of this?

Is Judy Hopps a main character, or is it merely a cameo appearance as some kind of joke?

Find out next time, on _Zystopian Gods!_

Thanks for reading!


	3. All that for a toothbrush?

Hello, dear reader.

Right now, this fanfiction has three things stopping it from being published more quickly:

Thing #1: My other one. _A Rather Wonderous Journey Through Wilde Worlds_ is a bit higher on my priorities than this thing.

Thing #2: Plot. I'm still not sure where the hell this one is going, and I don't want to write myself into a corner, so I have to think _really_ hard about something before I write it down.

Thing #3: School. I no longer have all the time in the world to write, although I _do_ try.

That being said, I have not forgotten about Julian West, or his [mis]adventures.

 **DISCLAIMER:** this chapter contains a brief (as in, ~7 lines) sex scene. This is an M-rated fic, so I assume that you're mature enough to handle a dingaling-dong or two.

* * *

The (naked) android pulled back the curtain, peering into the shower with a mostly neutral, but somewhat joking look on his face.

"So, you done yet?" Randall's voice was now beginning to flutter and sing, breaking from the monotone and establishing a semi-non-robotic tone that somehow scared Julian shitless.

"What the fuck are you doing in here?!"

In what was rapidly becoming a futile effort at modesty, He tried to push the curtain back, but Randall wouldn't let him.

"C'mon man!" Said Randall, in what could've been his first attempt at jest "You've been in there for 4 minutes and 28 sec-"

"Get lost, creep!"

Julian shoved the socially inept android away and forcefully pulled the shower curtain closed.

"Julian, I can still see you."

He cupped one of his hands over his crotch.

"Julian, I can _still_ see your-"

"WELL CAN YOU CUT IT OUT WITH THE X-RAY SHIT?"

"Julian, even if I _were_ to halt my monitoring, it would in no way impact or erase the thousands of scans that I've already taken, each of which detailing your anatomy down to molecular precision. Also, for the record, it's not an X-ray beam, and I am no more capable of turning it off than you are able to _stop_ seeing inside an open box. Because that's what you, your curtain, and your walls are to me: An open box, or perhaps more accurately, a set of concentric circles sketched around a square. Draw as many of them as you want, but the circles will in no way impact my ability to see the square, or in this case, your internal organs and genitals, because I don't see through them or past them at all. I see _around_ them."

"Do you really _have_ to be staring at my dick though?"

"It is not so much that I am constantly monitoring your penis specifically, but that from my vantage point, I can monitor and measure the _entirety_ of you, which just so happens to include-"

Julian stepped from behind the curtain, as if in defeat. As he bothered to get a proper look at the thing standing in his bathroom, he noticed just how much it had changed since he'd stepped into the shower. Clad as usual in beige with cream trim, the thing standing in front of him was now a near perfect facsimile of a _very_ attractive male fox, excepting the 5-fingered hands, the still bolt-upright ears and the jack-o-lantern nixie tube eyes, shining as always from their utterly alien mounts.

"Well if you _must_ measure my dick, then can you _at least_ tell me what you think of it?"

"All systems read nominal. Do you wish to administer a test run?"

"...what the-" Julian paused mid sentence, contemplating the scenario. This android, this _thing_ , was offering him sex?

On any other day of the week, he would've categorically rejected such an opportunity...however, realizing that he had his collar off outside of Honey's apartment for the first time in _years_ , Julian began to reconsider. Although he had been lucky enough to lose his virginity before they were invented, he could count on one 4-fingered hand the number of orgasms he'd had after the collars had been introduced, none of them good, considering that one had to cum _around the_ Orwellian machines strapped to their necks.

"-wait...what exactly would that entail?"

"Do you wish to run a test?" Randall, in spite of what seemed to be a newfound capacity for emotional expression, remained stoic as ever.

"What sort of test?"

"Sperm counts, prostate function, erecto-mechanical-"

"OK, and if we were to run the test..."

"Julian, I would advise you to sit down for this one." Randall put his hands together in what was largely a theatrical display. Frankly, he could've done it just fine with both arms shot off and lying on the floor.

"Are you sure you wish to do this?"

Julian sat in the shower, his member already fully emerged in anticipation.

"Yes."

Julian would come to regret this decision.

"So...what happens now-"

A sharp _thwack_ and an overwhelming pain-gasmic throbbing engulfed his pelvis, drowning him in strange feelings that were neither pleasant nor entirely his own.

It was over in less than 2 seconds.

"Test successful, all systems nominal."

Julian, still slightly too dazed to stand, yelled at the mind-reading android from the floor.

" _What the fuck was that?_ "

"A successful test."

"Well whatever the hell it is, _don't do it again_."

It... _chuckled_? Yes, Randall was _chuckling_ now. Julian did not like it when the android chuckled. It was repugnant.

"...Oh...you probably thought that was going to be e _njoyable_. If you'd wanted _that_ , why didn't you just ask for it?"

Julian's face sagged into a soft sigh as he finally hoisted himself from the floor.

"Well look, foxes don't dry instantly, so sit down and find something to do, 'cuz if you're waiting on me, then you'll be here for a while."

"Actually, if you don't mind, _I_ can handle the that. Just say the word and you will be as dry as a bone."

"Considering what just happened, I'm somewhat reluctant to accept your offer."

"Don't tell me you thought I'd drain your blood or something...although I _can_ do that, mind you."

Julian, still somewhat dazed, stepped from the shower, soggy and dripping.

"Fine, just get it over with."

"Get _what_ over with?"

"What do _you_ think?" Julian, who was mildly annoyed from several things (including his dubiously consensual electrostimulation several seconds prior), spat out this most sarcastic of phrases.

"I haven't spent nearly enough time poking around in your head to deduce that."

"Can you just dry my goddamn fur?" Now he was really annoyed with this...Randall.

"It's done."

And it was. In the blink of an eye, the water had been transferred to a recently materialized glass in Randall's left hand, not a drop remaining on Julian himself, who was still a tad bit too frustrated (and dazed) to care.

"And while we're at it, can I have my collar back now?"

" **No.** " The strength of Randall's response was both unnerving and unusual.

"What do you _mean_ no?

"No. As I vaporized it, the device no longer exists, and I will not give you another."

"Why not?"

"Rule 1."

"And what's that supposed to mean?

"You hate those things to a dangerous extent, and I know better than to give you one."

"So what am I supposed to do? Hide here _forever?_ If those cops get _one_ look at me without the collar I'll be off to the slammer before you could even-"

"Julian, you purchased a set. Use them."

He held the toothbrush towards Julian's chest.

"Now from what I heard, you came here to take a shower and retrieve your toothbrush, and you've done both. So why don't we adjourn?"

"And the cops?"

"You have a set. They can only stop you if you let them."

They were now both in the alley behind the building with a very subtle _pop,_ fully clothed (complete with a fancy late-autumn scarf for Julian) and teetering on the edge of destiny.

"After you...or should I take the lead?" Randall gestured.

"Can you just leave me alone for 5 minutes?!"

"Fine." Randall briskly jogged out of the alley and rounded the corner as he took off for god-knows-where, childishly running as if he were an airplane.

Perhaps he was trying to set an example.

An example of how to get yourself killed.

* * *

Judy sat at the wheel of her cruiser, running patrol as usual. Although she wasn't in the _worst_ part of town, she nevertheless found herself double checking her door locks here. But was it fair to be so suspicious? City hall _had_ voted to integrate the chompers _in spite of_ the savage attacks, and of course there were the tame collars, the real protectors of the city, guarding against future outbreaks.

A beige blur dashing past the cruiser interrupted her musings on gentrification. Jolted from her own shoddy introspection, she noticed, to her horror, that this fox was _not_ wearing a collar.

It also briefly seemed as if his eyes were glowing orange, not at all unlike the streetlights.

Throwing her caution and curiosity to the wind, she floored it in pursuit of this newfound menace.

* * *

Julian hesitantly approached the edge of the sidewalk, knowing that one overly nosy cop would mean certain doom, or something far, far worse than death. He peered around the buildings to either side, thankfully noting that nobody else seemed to be in this part of town, and began walking back to Honey's neighborhood.

The flashing blue lights made him reconsider in an instant, and he found himself darting for the other part of town. Although it had occurred to him that maybe it was Randall who had gotten in trouble with the law, not wearing a collar and all, Julian found himself hard pressed to care, largely due to the fact that he too was barenecked and running for it, his head glancing over his shoulder as he made sure that nobody was following him.

After what seemed an eternity of running, Julian finally convinced himself that the cops weren't on to him, and he stopped and took a look around. Although he wasn't exactly lost, his memories of this place were rusty, and he _was_ half way across town, in the bad part of town, b _y himself_.

So he kept walking, as one does when they are lost and would rather find their own way than be found in a ditch 3 weeks later.

Not that it helped. The sidewalks below him were only getting grungier, the whole block now permeated by the funks, gunks and reekings of shifty things and even shiftier people.

Julian hooked a left, darted across the road, and kept on walking as he passed yet another of Zootopia's many alleys.

Several steps later, Julian briefly registered some sort of sound behind him, and in spite of his better judgement, he returned to the alley, focusing his "night vision" into the darkness. As he stared, he became aware of a dim yet piercing set of lupine eyes glaring back at him, and not wanting to learn anything more about their owner, he decided to leave.

Only there were now two wolves blocking his path, the third slowly emerging from the alley.

"Whadd'you think 'bout dis guy?"

"Pipsqueak, Idunno."

Julian growled in what was both annoyance and fear.

"Ya' tink he's got money?"

"Well whadd'you say we find out?"

Julian stepped back, and they closed in.

"Listen, all I've got is this _toothbrush_ here."

"Yeah. _Right_."

The fist from behind sent him face-planting into the greasy sidewalk.

"Idunno about you guys, but I think the pipsqueak's scarf'll fetch a pretty penny..."

One of the wolves took the scarf.

"Oh shit! Who 'da hell is 'dis guy?"

"Better question is how he knows The Big."

The wolves gave their partner the classic _WTF_ look that only canines seem capable of mustering, definitively recognizable even here in the near nonexistent lighting.

"Well you see I been tinking-" The lupine with the especially thick accent hauled Julian up to face him, putting his bare neck on display for all to see.

"-'bout how a guy like this knows The Big."

"So what if 'dis guy knows Mr Big?"

"Well if he knows The Big, then metinks The Big wouldda' told us he was coming, us not mugging one of his associates an' all." (Billiard)

"So the pipsqueak ain't an associate of The Boss?"

"Well fuck you too fluffbutt!" Julian _hated_ that nickname, and the wolves seemed to ignore his remark.

"'Den how's he got 'dat neck of his?"

"Well that's just it ya'see: It duddin' mean he's a _friend_ of the Big. Only 'dat he got one of The Big's keys."

"So the pipsqueak's a _scab?_ "

"Hey I ain't a fucking _scab!_ " Julian was now as worried as he was angry, and was almost expecting his collar to go off...

"Let's find out, shall we?"

Then he once again realized that he wasn't wearing one.

At this point, two events transpired almost simultaneously. First, the sounds of several lockblade stilettos springing open could faintly be heard.

As could a set of rapidly approaching footsteps.

"Right on que and 5 minutes later, I'm back!" Randall's surprisingly playful voice startled the mobsters, all shifting to face the android who was taking a bow as if he were in a stage play.

"And from the look of things, I say you've got quite the fight on your hands...C'mon Julian! Let's whoop their sorry asses!"

Their cackling broke into all out, albeit subdued laughter.

"Really? Gimme _one_ reason why _you_ could even _touch_ me." Considering that this wolf stood a full 7 foot 8, this would've been a decent point, excepting the fact that it was Randall being talked down to.

"I'll give you f _ive!_ " Like an old-timey vaudeville actor, Randall puffed out his chest and held his 5-digit left hand up for the challenger to see, curling his fingers one by one as he emulated a joke from _the Peanuts_.

"One, two, three, four, five! See? A fist! Here, Julian, let me show you how it's done."

The android dashed over to Julian and grabbed his hand, manually curling his digits into position much like his had been several seconds before.

"Now all you gotta' do is put it through that bastard's facehole!"

The wolf stooped down in the most offensive way possible.

"Really? Ya'think that'll be enough to beat me? Go ahead, give it your best shot, _pipsqueak!_ "

Julian, grimacing as he braced for the jolting from a collar that was no longer there, leapt for the cone-eared fuckwit's face without so much as a grunt, Julian's fist meeting his muzzle with a satisfying thud as the lupine collapsed on the sidewalk. Julian then turned his attention to the others.

"Alright. Real fuckin' funny..." Brandishing their knives, they approached the two foxes, hell bent on making them both a mess to be cleaned up after, Julian himself having similar intentions.

* * *

Judy had radioed for backup, and was now frantically searching for the uncollared fox: desperate to find him before he went savage, and too petrified to leave the safety of her cruiser for that same reason.

Then she saw them: Three wolves, the uncollared beige runner, and an equally barenecked red fox who was just as dangerous, this latest conclusion only reinforced by the the image of Julian knocking out Bernard the wolf in a single hit.

"Officer Hopps reporting _two_ barenecks and possible pack behavior on 42nd street. Over."

After a rather poignant pause, she flipped on her lights and resumed her chase.

* * *

The wolves' attempt at intimidation was cut off by a ZPD siren.

"Oh boy!" Randall, the flashing blue lights glinting in his glassy eyes that just so happened to actually be made from glass, was now rather jubilant. "Methinks my friends have come back!"

Randall turned to whisper to Julian. "We never _did_ finish our game of hide and go seek. Wanna' play?"

The android took off in an instant, once again running with his arms out like a kid pretending to be a plane, Julian hardly a second behind, the wolves giving chase as they struggled to keep up. The voice of Officer Hopps played by loudspeaker, demanding they stop, echoing through the street as the two foxes ran for nowhere in particular, with Julian's running of a rather desperate sort. He was starting to get the hang of speedrunning, although he remained baffled by Randall's mischievous glee.

Julian glanced over his shoulder, the cop car as close as ever. "We'll never outrun them!"

"Then we'll out _corner_ them!" Randall responded, as if Julian's concerns were some kind of dare.

As they came to an only semi-deserted intersection, Randall suddenly grabbed Julian by the arm and hooked a left around the support pole of a traffic light, flinging the pair down the street with Randall's borderline supernatural powers that acted on every atom of Julian equally and simultaneously, with two ZPD cruisers at the other end of said street, charging for Julian like bulls for the matador.

"Uh..." Julian kept running, in spite of the rapidly approaching obstacle. "...you see those cruisers, right?"

"Affirmative!" In the blink of an eye, Randall had briefly grabbed Julian by the shoulders, flinging him into the air, where he arced right over the cops in a manner that was almost graceful. Moments later, Randall launched himself off the ground, somersaulted through the air, and joined Julian on the other side, both foxes running for it in a now empty street.

"Come on Julian, it's a straight shot! Let's see you crack _60_!

"Wait, we're doing _60?_ "

"Well look down, Julian..."

Julian, loosing focus on Randall, did so, and to his horror, he actually _was_ running at 57 KPH. As a whole swarm of _WTF_ type questions flooded his mind, he stumbled, slipped, fell, and otherwise skidded across a dozen meters or so of pavement, before grinding to a stop at a traffic light, leaving a rather nasty trail of bloodied asphalt behind him.

The same grey polygons from Julian's dream, having completed their primary task, busied themselves tidying up Julian's blood, completing this latest chore in milliseconds, with Julian himself getting back up as if nothing had happened, right as an 18-wheeler ran a red light and flew past at god-knows-how-many miles per hour.

Randall theatrically tugged at his wrist cuffs. "Perhaps its a good thing you stopped just there, or I'd have a _much_ bigger cleanup job on my hands."

The android looked both ways in an equally theatrical gesture.

"Now come along! Our game remains afoot, and we must move if we are to stay ahead, literally _or_ figuratively!"

Randall took his first step as if he were going to resume his city-wide jaunt, instead once again grabbing Julian an heaving them both flat against the wall of the nearest building, Randall having already turned to face Julian, both suddenly clad in drab trenchcoat and hat, which partially obscured most of their faces as if they were cartoon characters who were trying to be sneaky.

"Now at this point-" Randall swiped a cigar from the breast-pocket of Julian's newfound trenchcoat, which he had probably planted there and was somehow already lit, and took a notable, but not quite long enough to be considered properly long, drag from it, exhaling the smoke while talking as if he were a demon.

"I'd like to introduce you to the two most important P's in your set: _Persuasion_ and _Perception_."

Randall struck the most conspicuously casual pose that Julian had ever seen, and Julian, having realized that reality had long-ago jumped off of the Seagram's Building, imitated him just as a quartet of angry ZPD cruisers flew right past, not one of the officers noticing the very two foxes they were trying to find.

"Quick! They're getting away!" Randall shoved Julian into a trot and literally threw away his cigar, which exploded in a fireball the size of a minivan upon impact with the pavement.

"What do you mean they're getting away?! Wasn't that the goal?" This latest line of what is most accurately described as insane troll logic made even less sense to Julian than most of the other things his acquaintance had said over their last half-hour together.

"Well yes-" Randall quickened his running "-distancing ourselves from the police is the _final_ goal, but before that, we must distance ourselves from this part of the city, and evade their detection."

He tugged on Julian's arm, as if to say "Run faster!" To Julian's surprise, they were closing the gap between them and the cruisers.

"And where better to do that-"

Randall gripped one of the seams of the rear body panel of the cop car and heaved himself atop it, offing his 5-fingered hand to Julian.

"-then literally right behind them?"

"You're crazy!" Said Julian, as he accepted Randall's offer and hopped atop the cruiser's trunk himself.

"Well, the cops are driving only a bit slower than we were running, and as long as you don't tell them, they will never know that we're here." Randall materialized yet another cigar, which was somehow was not only already lit upon procurement, but stayed lit, even atop a police car travelling at 60 KPH.

The cruiser continued down the road, crossing over one of the older bridges that signified the border of the nastier part of town, and the fact that they were no longer in it, and were still probably headed in the general direction of Honey's townhouse.

And then another cop car pulled in behind them.

"Methinks they saw us." Spoken perfectly calm, in a manner typical of Randall's backwards priorities that were as absurd as they were consistent.

The police car, after several seconds and an over-the-shoulder check from the cop riding shotgun, began to slow down.

"Just remember the two P's and play it cool."

"Wha-"

Randall shoved yet another cigar in Julian's mouth, making both foxes, clad in matching trenchcoats and hat, appear almost identical, excepting their fur coloration, which wasn't very visible to begin with.

The cruiser came to a halt, and Officer Bucky the Zebra stepped out to greet the hitchhikers.

"Excuse me, but have either of you seen a pair of barenecked foxes around here lately?" Officer Bucky, in response to a situation that was as unbelievable as it was awkward, broke the ice with the least confrontational question he could think of.

Julian, lowing his cigar, let out a plume of smoke that was made even more impressive by the added condensation in the not-quite frigid November air.

"Nope."

"And, pardon if I ask, but what are you two doing _on my car?_ "

"W-wait a minute..." Randall slurred in a rather uncharacteristic new accent. "Gee, I thought 'dis was a bench. Sorry."

He got up and off the car, Julian following.

"Bucky you idiot!" Judy's growling anger pierced the relative calm. "Those _ARE_ the barenecked foxes!"

"Run?" For the first time, Julian posed the question in a manner that was almost playful. Under the circumstances, this was hardly surprising.

"Better idea." Randall gestured to the railyard they just so happened to be right next to them, on the other side of a fence.

"Time to play _dodgetrain!_ "

Randall hopped over the fence in one near-effortless leap, the rolling stock on the other side now starting to slowly roll to and fro like maracas.

Julian, in a move that wasn't quite as impressive as Randall's, took a running step, leapt for the fence, grabbed the top rail, and swung himself over the top in a manner reminiscent of a parkour Lash Vault, darting betwixt the cars before being rudely interrupted (and crushed) by an oncoming train.

* * *

"Do you wish to continue?"

* * *

"Uggh..."

Julian came to on the couch with a slight nosebleed.

Randall stood over him, having invited himself to crash at Honey's house.

"Are you alright?" He asked almost entirely in jest.

"Wha...what the fuck just happened?" All the memories from Julian's most recent excursion to procure a toothbrush came back all at once.

"You had an accident." Randall had made a hobby out of comically downplaying certain matters.

"Who the hell are you?" Honey asked.

In his attempt at humor through anatomical impossibility, Randall swiveled his head _all the way around_ to face Cyrus, as if he were that girl from _The Exorcist._

"HELLO!" Considering who he was talking to, perhaps the cyberman-esque fluctuating robot accent was taking it a tad too far.

" **DIE ANDROID!** "

Cyrus proceeded to blow Randall's head off with a 12-gauge shotgun, its body collapsing on the living room floor.

EDIT: Minor grammatical edits and some foreshadowing.


	4. Locks, Keys, and Bombs

Author's note: The narration for the first part is going to be extremely confusing and grammatically atrocious. This was done intentionally, as it is being narrated by...well, you'll see.

* * *

Good morning good morning how I do hate the morning yes I do hate the morning yes I do hate the morning oh so very very very much for whatever is the morning but not the stark end to the fun times and dream countries where there are no shakles no padded walls no straightjackets no preds no buzzing tube lights no white-masked-men mammals with icepicks no screaming no grey glop food no bars on the doors and no Boltface the lock laughing at me?

Yes I do hate the mornings so very very much as much as I do very very much hate Bolface the lock for whatever is he but not that which in the morning ends the fun times and dream countries where there are no locks that I hate yes I do hate hate hate hate the lock that ticks I hate that it tocks It hate I hate I hate that it shifts yet never opens!

Let me tell you about just how much I hate those locks:

Eeehhhh taet h ttte teeee eh aahhhaeaattaa tettte taaatethhtaeeee h h ateeeheaata athe t h hahtethhteth ea tetththhthaaeht h eatett tth hahaea eaha h taa teaat ttaeethee theha a e heehhaaeh ataaahe ht eahtaaeehehaeea th tatttattthh th atahhhethteaeheae ae ahe eahaeaetahatha hae t thtaahhhhea etahte a hteeha ee a ea ahah ta t htee aheatetahaaeaea teh ethh hha ethht h ahhhthha teteaeetaaathhetaehtehe tathtta t aheaaae eahat e hhataahahaeaaaaeh tt taett aettttehha hh eetetahat eetaaethteh ttteh heateae ahaa taeete ah tta thhtt he h h he thh eah heaeeheaae heheeath hte te e taeett a at t hheeatthth ht.

"That doesn't even make sense, Dawn! You just rattled off a bunch of incoherant babblings which you seem to think mean something. They don't."

Am I not even safe in my own head, Mr. Boltface? I swear, you are as bad as the doctors and their lobotomies!

Where was I again?

Oh, right! By golly I do hate that lock even-more-so-than-I do hate the mornings for what are the locks but not what makes the mornings so horrid to begin with, oh how much I hate that lock yes I do hate that lock to such a degree that it makes me wonder what the degree to which I hate locks is. How much do I hate Boltface? good question? How many hatreds, O Boltface, have I espoused at thee? How many times could one count, I do wonder, how very many combinations have I tried now with no success, each failure prompting another insult farted in your general direction, typically on the subject of your father and elderberries?

What's a father?

What's an elderberries?

What's a Monty, and how does it relate to Pythons?

 ** _AND WHAT'S THE COMBINATION FOR THIS FUCKING LOCK!_**

E4560X24EX3E7290  
7265 7X948223X395  
86313EE8EE047641  
255XX9XE E3840829

Methinks 3. Yes, methinks to try 3. And why doth methinks to try 3? Because it's bigger than 2.

 _Fuck 2. I hate it._

All of the worst things in life are twofold: I had two brothers, disgraced and disappointed, two parents, despicable and deplorable, The doctors use two electrodes in _the bad room_ , discordant and _disorganized_.

31122EE6 13453831  
E311106050337415 3  
7&EX5X85394XE74 2  
E7XE1407338EX4XX

AHA! Dastardly pins I have thee now! Methought 3 was bigger and better. 'Tis indeed, for none of the worst of my life came in threes.

2E79XX2EE53915X80  
2E7757767X367X0X4  
2E717502 03XX3795  
2E7EE 9X253932449

Oh, it appears "methinks 2" would've also sufficed.

 _ **STUPID FUCKING 2! GET OUTTA' HERE!**_

At any rate, it won't be long now...Already I can feel those damned tumblers sliding into place, with or without that damned 2.

2E7 99E28783X X2X6 2E75 08973E4264866 2E7190887553222 36 2E7 008e341359 336

But wait? Is not 8 biggerstill than 3? But 8 is 2 raised to the 3rd! _SURELY THE GREATEST EVIL THERE EVER WAS!_ And is 387.44 not furthermore biggerstill than 8?

And is 21190084035811136 not furthermore evenbiggerstill than 387.44?

Except there are too many 1's. Such a pretty thing, 1, like the red pills.

 _ **I FUCKING HATE THE RED PILLS! I HATE THEM MORE THAN THE LOCKS WHICH I HATE MORE THAN THE MORNINGS WHICH I HATE MORE THAN THE STRAITJACKETS AND BARS AND EVEN THE 8'S!**_

They are also so much prittier when they a _ren't_ in my stomach, and not on the keycode for the lock.

Fuck 1. They suck.

2E79008403581XX36  
2E70008 434620536  
2E7X008 233X52536  
2E780082133755536

Yes...Your secrets to me, O boltface the lock, you will yeild on pain of...

 _HOW DO I GET THIS FUCKING THING OPEN?!_

...death.

"And how will you go about doing that, Dawn?" The deadbolt mimed.

O boltface the lock, how very foolish of thee?

Thinking you can get away with angering me?

2E780082133755536  
2E780081133775536  
2E780080133355536  
2E78008X133765536

Can't you not see?

Against the force of my will, you could not triumph even with all of the world's brawn.

Upon seeing Boltface the deadbolt's locking mechanism suddenly twist to the right with a sharp click, I could little more than scream the muffled screams of internal ecstasy as the door to the little hellhole of a cell in the bowels of the Cliffside Insane Asylum bowed to my will at last, in a manner that was only slightly metaphorical.

I, a longtime, high-security inmate of the Cliffside Insane Asylum, clad in semi-soiled straitjacket and facemask, have been captivated over the years by numerous delusions of escape: Whether frolicking carefree through wide-open pred-infested jungles, making snow-angels in the boiling desert dunes, or flying like a bird through the brick walls and buildings of Earth, I'd seen all of the things that one tended to see when one was tending to see things because one was indeed seeing the things that one tended to see when one was seeing things because they were indeed seeing things.

But in those tendings of the seeings of things I'd never tended to see _power_. Never the power to pick locks at a distance, never the power to undo the straps on my straitjacket without lifting a...

What the fuck even _are_ these? Hands? Hooves? _Hobgoblins?_ And what ought I to call the things that protrude from them? fingers? Sub-hooves? _Digits?_

Whatever the hell they are (stupid lexographers), I didn't have to lift even a single one, even as I shattered that fucking flourescent tube that tormented me to no end and impaled Dr. Moosebridge on all 387,440,000 peices of it (and to this end, I had counted every last one of them. (In base-12.)).

And certainly never the power to actualize my delusions. Yet fate, who tended to take the personified form of a mammal with nixie tube eyes, in this case, specifically that of a porcelain ewe with luminesceing orange 3's for pupils in the brown glass envelopes that were her eye sockets, had seen fit to enable me to do _exactly_ that.

Oh look, there's Nurse Swinton, in the break room!

Oh look, there's Nurse Swinton, her eyeballs made inside out and turned into salt.

Oh look, there's Nurse Swinton, begging me to let her die.

Methinks we can't be having that, now can we?

Methinks playtime has only just begun.

 ** _TAG! YOU'RE IT!_**

* * *

Cyrus was screaming, the latest of Randall's bullet-perforated bodies tumbling to the floor with a set of melancholic clangs.

Said floor was now thoroughly littered with little bits and peices of android, Randall having been respawned and immediately shot by the overzealous Cyrus each and every time, several times.

"OK-"

This time he'd appeared _behind_ her, one of his hands already on her shoulder.

Cyrus swivelled in the blink of an eye, precariously waving her shotgun in the android's general direction. Randall, now evidently unamused, proceeded to wrench the gun from her hands in an unstoppable instant with the force of a thousand suns.

"-This really is getting old."

With an even greater force, the android, who by this point has been well established as more of a mechanical god than anything else, proceeded to tie the shotgun's barrel into a knot, accompanied by an almost painful squeal from the now mutilated gun as it was bent out of shape.

Randall handed the gun, which he had rendered entirely useless, back to Cyrus.

"Now-" clapping his hands and _disappearing_ the android corpses lying on the floor, Randall sat down on a red velvet chair that he'd materialized, the chair itself curvaceous, heart-shaped in stature and so tall that it nearly scraped the ceiling of Honey's apartment. "-can we sit down and talk like civilized persons?"

Cyrus removed a somewhat large magnet from her pocket and threw it at Randall, the magnet sticking to his head with a hollow _clang_ , prompting the android, whose circuits had not been fried by the magnet, to sigh.

" _Honestly_ Julian, I have no idea how you tolerate them."

"Cyrus, just cut it out already-" Julian himself, his momentary surprise and alarm having worn off, was also getting annoyed with Cyrus' antics.

"DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DANGEROUS THAT THING IS?"

" _You don't even know the half of it_ , so why don't you stop pissing him off?"

Watson's frantic pounding on the door momentarily shattered the almost tangible tension, and his muffled voice could vaguely be heard from within the apartment.

"It's Watson! Let me in, it's _freezing_ out here!"

Honey, pausing to verify that he was alone through the peephole, obliged.

"Watson!" The badger exclaimed. "What took you so long?"

"I came as fast as I could..." He paused to catch his breath as Honey shut the door and un-did the latch on his collar. "Where is he?"

Julian had been gone for almost 47 minutes, and as Watson himself had things to attend to, he'd gone back to his house to attend to them.

"Oh hello!" Randall pontificated, playfully swinging the entire chair around to face the scientist, as if he were a cartoon supervillain.

"Nice to meet you! You can call me Randall, and _you_ must be... _Watson_."

In the blink of an eye Randall had, with near total silence, teleported from sitting in his chair to standing right next to Watson the Bobcat, his porcelain arm already around Watson's shoulder

"Say _buddy,_ they tell me you're a _scientist_ , that you're going to try to pry me apart and work out all my secrets!"

He was now several feet in front of Watson, again by teleport.

"All I can say is-" the android took a long drag from the generic cigar he'd materialized in his hand, gently exhaling the smoke as if he were a dragon (or perhaps a kobold).

"-good luck."

And then he was back in his chair, facing Julian and Cyrus. Three other chairs of a decidedly less exotic make (unpainted wood blocks) appeared around Randall's chair, as if they were seats for a board meeting.

"Here, pull up a chair."

Upon further inspection, Watson found that, actually, the wooden chairs were _very_ exotic: The beams were perfectly straight, perfectly smooth, and perfectly square. Furthermore, there were no screws, no nuts, nor anything else to indicate that the chairs had been _assembled_ at all. Even the wood grain, which also traced a set of perfectly spaced, perfectly round concentric circles, ran parallel throughout every last centimeter of the chairs, which had no visible knots or cracks whatsoever, as if they had been tediously whittled from a 1 in a billion tree.

Or perhaps they had been specially and specifically constructed, _atom by atom_ , on behalf of Randall, who seemed to have a thing for excessive displays of craftsmanship in places nobody else bothered to look.

As Watson sat in one of the aforementioned impossibly perfect wooden chairs, he noticed something that the others had missed.

"Julian, where's your collar?"

As the others turned to get a better look at Julian, they saw that indeed, his neck was bare, and that it bore a brand new pair of scorch marks. Regenerative powers or not, there was no way he could've possibly gotten out of it. Yet he had, anyway, and they'd all missed it.

Cyrus, irrationally obsessed with the android, hadn't bothered to look.

Honey, surprised by Randall's entrance and frantic to calm down her friend _before_ she destroyed the house, hadn't bothered to check on Julian.

Julian sighed. "Here, there, _everywhere_. I made a...friend...on the way to my apartment. Ladies and gentlemen, _this_ -" he gestured to the seemingly giddy android in the chair "-is Randall, and, to answer Watson's question, he vaporized it in full view of several ZPD officers."

"How?" Watson spoke up.

Randall's left hand rapidly contorted into a gun shape, a thin crimson plasmatic veil gathering around the tip of his index finger like a weaponized E.T.

"I can show you! Just say the word, Julian."

"Actually-" Julian answered. "-I think he'd prefer it if I used a key." Without even thinking about it, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a collar key from it.

"Ah! So _that's_ how you're supposed to get out of those things." Randall appeared jubilant, as if he'd worked out the solution to an immense puzzle.

"Well actually, you're not _supposed_ to take them off. _Ever_. Hell, possessing one of these things is a criminal offense!"

Honey nearly shat herself at the sight of what appeared to be her key. "Julian?!"

"Yes?" Julian set the key down on the table, still not fully aware of what he'd done.

"Where the hell did you get that key?!"

Julian, having finally realized exactly what he had pulled out of his pocket, stared at the key in horror. Indeed, it looked almost _exactly_ like Honey's key, down to the last capacitor.

"I..."

He re-examined his own hands, a if they were those of a wizard, conjuring things from the ether. (And, just between you and me, this wasn't a terribly inaccurate description.)

"I don't know..." Julian ran off to the basement.

"Well that's an easy one." Randall interrupted. " _I_ put it there."

"Well you keep your grubby mitts off of _my_ key, understand?"

The android sat there for several seconds, attempting to work out the meaning of Honey's barely concealed threat.

"What are you talking about? _Your_ key is still safe in its box."

"Then what the fuck is that thing?" Honey was understandably furious.

Watson picked it up, and attempted to use it, his own collar releasing its choke-hold on him with a click that, for its owner, was almost orgasmic.

"I dare say-" he said "-that it's a _working_ collar key."

" _MY_ key."

"No-" they both said.

"Oh, were you saying something?" Asked Randall.

"As a matter of fact, I was. Yes, it works, and yes, it's a key, and yes, Honey's key is still in its box."

"And you're going to believe _that thing?!_ "

"Honey-" Watson spoke up. "you're being irrational."

"Are you blind? That's my key!"

"No, it isn't!" Julian burst back into the room with something in his right hand. It was Honey's key, a spitting image, _down to the last capacitor._

For dramatic effect, Julian set it down a foot away from the other key.

"As Randall said-" Julian paused, still catching his breath from running up the stairs. "-it was still in its box. Randall, what the hell did you do?"

" _Exactly what you told me to do!_ " The android mouthed in what approximated a defensive tone. "You told me you wanted a key, and as you were intimately familiar with that specific key, and as it was the only reference point I had to go off of, I made you one."

"So you made another key?" Cyrus asked, a smile spreading across her lips as a rather naughty idea wormed its way through her brain.

"Yes."

"Could you make more?"

"Dozens."

At this moment, dozens of identical collar keys, all a spitting image of Honey's, began to appear all around the room, each with a soft puff as it materialized from the void.

In that moment, one could accurately say that it was raining collar keys in Honey's apartment.

"How the hell did you do that?!" Cyrus was utterly dumbfounded.

This time, Watson spoke up. "I believe it to be like a fax machine: A duplicate is made by scanning the document and depositing ink, where the act of copying the document doesn't delete the-"

Randall interjected. "Sorry, Watson, but that's not quite right: This was not copied from anything: it was constructed from Julian's exact memetic specifications. He asked for a key, and _this_ was how he defines a key."

"Except I didn't ask for a key." Julian deadpanned.

"Yes, you-" The android paused, mid-sentence.

"Oh...of course, you're all split minds. That explains _everything!_ "

"Umm, what?" Cyrus, for what was neither the first nor the last time, was confused.

"Well, Cyrus, there are beings in the universe whose minds are not dissimilar to a computer, where every last transistor is accounted for in the same program. Beings who say to themselves: _Now it is time to ovulate, oh, and my blood oxygen level is getting low. Perhaps a heartbeat is in order_...and then there's you lot: A raft of a mind adrift in a sea of unconscious operations that execute whether you want them to _or not_. Of course! A key was ordered-"

Randall teleported atop the table, his ring-finger finger poking Julian twice in the forehead.

"-but _you_ didn't command it directly! They key was ordered _subconsciously._ No wonder you were having so much trouble using the override command; because for your species, _there isn't one_."

Everyone in the room, excepting Randall, now wore a somewhat awkward expression, which Randall himself soon imitated.

"Well..." Honey broke the ice. "We're not actually the same species."

"We're not even the same genus." Watson said, as he reached for a biology textbook on Honey's shelf.

"Here, read this. It explains it."

Randall held it for a few seconds before teleporting it back onto its shelf.

"Fascinating. You are a cat, Julian a fox, Honey a badger, and you, Cyrus-"

The android paused, calculating. Cyrus was quite the puzzle, but eventually, an answer emerged.

"-are a _Coywolf_ "

Cyrus was flabbergasted. Her mixed species parentage was a secret she'd planned on taking to her grave, and with good reason. To say the least, outed mudbloods were in for a lifetime of very bad days.

"How? How could _you_ possibly know?"

"It's in your genome, Cyrus. As readily apparent to me as your eye color."

Honey had a question. "So you can sequence a genome at a distance?"

"And you're telling me you can read text off a page?" Apparently this hyperintelligent alien had also begun to crack sarcasm.

"And how did you even read that book? You never even opened it?" Honey was rather intrigued by this latest display of the android's powers.

A glowing red cube and an equally luminous extruded sapphire square (the latter shape being a hollow outline) emerged from the table, a neon green circle joining them atop the table. Two lime-green beams and a feild of chartruce (representing a raytraced feild of view) emerged from the circle, travelling to and being blocked by the square without reaching the cube in the center.

"And how does this circleman here see the cube without being inside of the square?"

The circle, now a cylinder, rose from the surface, the beams angling downwards to reach the cube from above.

"The answer, of course, is to get out of flatland. No 2-dimensional structure could possibly be erected to obscure the view of the 3rd dimensional being, just as no 4th dimensional construct could obscure either the text in that book nor the base-pairs in Cyrus' cells."

"Uh, sorry to interrupt, but there are only 3 dimensions in space." Said Cyrus, who now petrified of the thing that evidently either already knew her every secret or could readily deduce them on a whim.

"You forgot time." Both Randall and Watson stated in unison.

"I see _somebody_ here has studied physics!" Exclaimed Randall. "Or more precisely, what little your civilization knows of physics."

"Speaking of which, who built you? Before we were introduced, the problem of who _repaired_ Julian here was a rather glaring one, and with or without your parlor tricks, we still don't know who did this." Watson asked.

"Well, our main concern was that it was the government." Honey added.

The android chuckled. Julian hated it when he did that. "As if."

"So the government _can't_ sequence my genome by remote?"

"Nope."

" _Oh thank god!_ " Cyrus was visibly relieved. Inter species relationships were legally prohibited, and she'd be in _deep_ shit (forced sterilization at the very least) if city hall ever found out. Lesbianism (that is to say, the act of being a lesbian) was also illegal in Zystopia, and unfortunately for her, Cyrus checked both boxes.

"So you were built by aliens?"

"Affirmative."

Julian, who'd remained oddly quiet this whole time, grinned smugly. "Wow, I knew from Honey's lectures that first contact would be weird, but I never imagined _this!_ I mean, _The Day The Earth Stood Still_ has nothing on you!"

"Do I detect sarcasm, Julian?"

He sighed. "Well, I've been told since I was little to watch out for flying saucers and death rays...I never expected a teleporting robot with an affinity for magic tricks."

"You know Julian, you're in good company: countless sapient species have tried predicting the future...and just about all of them got it wrong."

"...How many are out there?" Compared to everything else Randall had already done, the existence of aliens was relatively mundane (especially for Julian).

Randall paused to count.

"Contingent on the definition of sapience and numerous other factors...approximately 4513 civilizations currently exist in this-"

He paused, the android's face growing somber. "Sorry, 4512 currently existing in this galaxy alone."

Honey understood what Randall's correction meant, an expression of abstract horror contorting her face. Watson, however, remained stoic, the full significance of Randall's correction flying right over his head.

"Wait, did you miscount?"

"No, I said there were approximately 4513 extant civilizations in this galaxy. As of 6.3 seconds ago, one of them just detonated the bomb."

They were now weightless, floating in a distant orbit 'round the most beautiful thing they'd ever seen: A so-called super-earth, 1.6 times the mass of their own world, covered from pole to pole in tropical archipelagos and shallow cyan seas, with more lights on the night side than a disco ballroom.

One of the lights, angry and orange, the exhaust of a rocket, was fast approaching them.

The ICBM, its shiny, conical warheads glinting in the light of a foreign sun, flew past their table (which had also been teleported here) at an almost incomprehensible speed, each passing second putting it 7,800 meters closer to turning the lights off forever on the doomed planet below. Another new light, this time the first strike of atomic hellfire, was lit below them, devouring 2 million lives in an instant.

* * *

Nurse Swinton, was eating a shitty microwaved lunch in the staff break room.

"Hello there, Ratchet." Her coworker chided.

How many times would she have to explain to her coworkers that quoting that postmodernist nonsense to her would in no way change her opinions on the matter? In this world there were crazies, and it was up to people like her to shut them away down here, lest their malfunctions get somebody killed.

The klaxon interrupted what little introspection she permitted herself on the subject of mental health care, lest she start sympathizing with the defectives.

Because then she'd be one herself. No, _itself_. Defectives weren't people, in fact, they were _dangerous_ , and if it took the ice pick and the electrodes to keep them docile, then so be it.

At any rate, she knew the klaxon meant trouble: Like a fire alarm (except this one didn't signal a fire), it was pulled at the first sign of an escape attempt.

Not that they ever got very far, but escapees _were_ a pain in the ass to get back into their cells.

"This is Dr Smalls. Dr. Moosebridge is dead, patient 672 has escaped, repeat, patient 672 has-"

The sound of audible choking, followed by death, was all that could be heard.

* * *

Well, it appears that, by followers _and_ by favorites, that this is the more popular of my Zootopia stories...I guess I should reconsider its back-burner status.


	5. You're fired!

" _Oryctolagus cuniculus_ proceeds to put the hand, finger, etc., on or into contact with _vulpes vulpes_ ' terminal, prehensile part of the upper limb in humans and other primates, consisting of the wrist, metacarpal area, fingers, and thumb."

/u/Frankie3110

* * *

6:50 AM, Saturday, November 17th, 1973.

 ** _BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!_**

As unfamiliar as the alarm clock's bleating was (Julian's was more of a buzzer than a beeper), it was still annoying as hell, and whether or not he could reasonably blame the clock for its annoyance, Julian slammed his fist on the button, silencing it like he wished he could silence that fucking beaver at the cannery, who, among other things, considered the idea of a 40-hour work week to be laughable.

Sighing, he descended the townhouse stairs to find Honey making toast, and hooked a left into the bathroom. About a minute or so later, he sat himself at the table, and took a bite of the toast.

"Well, you're up early." Said Honey.

"Impossible fox or not, I gotta' go to work." He said with a sigh.

Honey was bewildered. "On a Saturday?"

"My boss is an asshole. A grade-A, cud-chewing shitstain."

"Well at least he isn't having you up at 2 in the morning." Unlike Julian, Honey's memories of Nick's stint with the mafia were far from fond. She'd never been a big fan of "Komrade" Kolsov.

"And the mob actually paid me." And he meant it. Once upon a time, he'd had enough cash to help Honey buy the very townhouse he was currently sitting in. Nowadays, he probably wouldn't even qualify for the mortgage, and Honey, who was working as a mainframe technician for Lockheed, could've probably gotten it on her own.

"And you aren't now?"

"Well, let's just say that Nick made ends meet, but that's about it."

"Hold on-"

"What?"

"Did you just refer to Nicholas Wilde in the third person, as if he were someone else?"

Julian remembered the discussions of the previous night, when he had vehemently argued that he was, in fact, Nicholas Wilde. Yet here he was now, referring to it as one refers to a past life that lives no more.

Was he Nicholas Wilde? Yesterday he had been certain. Now, he was unsure.

"Well, if you excuse me..."

He got up, fished his collar from his pocket, and grumbled various obscenities as he put it on.

"Julian, where-"

Yet again, Julian realized he'd conjured a something from thin air, and it slowly dawned on him that whatever weirdness had gone down yesterday was _not_ going away any time soon. This second realization was further intensified as Randall, clad only in a pastel-purple towel, emerged from the closet. God knew what he was doing in there.

Wait, no, whatever sort of god there was (excepting Randall himself) probably had no idea, either. The Randall works in mysterious ways, after all.

"Julian-" the android pleaded. "-are you _sure_ you want one of those 'round your neck?"

" _I have to._ " Julian's voice was now notably stained by despair. In response, Randall rolled his eyes and shook his head.

"Well-" he said as he opened the door. "-you have much to learn."

"And you can't teach me?"

"It's like riding a bike-you _and_ your subconscious mind have to figure it out."

And with a twitch of the wrist, he'd flung away the towel and was off, barenecked, naked and running to who-knows-where, Julian himself stepping out after him.

"Ni-...Julian?" Honey corrected herself.

"Yes, Honey?"

"All that stuff that happened yesterday: None of it leaves this house. Understand?"

"OK, OK, I won't tell nobody. I'll be back for dinner." of course, he'd been lying. Well, actually, it was a bit more complicated than that. Julian understood that secrecy was probably a _very_ good idea in this scenario, and _he_ , for one, intended on keeping it that way...Unfortunately, Randall seemed to have no such reservations, and Julian figured that, one way or another, he'd see to it that the secret would get out.

In other words, Julian knew it wouldn't actually stay a secret, but he'd still try. Not exactly a lie, but more like a promise that he really had no power to enforce, a promise which somebody else could and probably would break in a heartbeat.

"And can you hand me the towel while you're at it?"

At least he could do _that_.

* * *

Slightly after 7:30 AM, downtown Zootopia:

Traffic had been bad today.

"You're _late!_ "

To be fair, he _was_ technically late...currently by exactly 1 minute 49.84625 seconds, most of that lateness owing to his boss (who, as previously explained, was approximately comparable to a faded old burlap sack full of rotting elephant turds) chewing him out over being late by 27 seconds.

No kidding, the penny-pinching bastard been sitting there, at the cannery door, _with a stopwatch_. Any excuse to dock Nick's pay was an excuse he'd _gladly_ take.

"You're lucky I don't fire your lazy ass on the spot for this!"

"Can I just get to work?" Julian sighed.

"Really, the con-artist _working?_ How gullible do you think I am?!" The beaver, who for all we know had a 10-inch canine dildo stuck up his ass, stormed away in his typical frustration.

"I'm _watching_ you, Wilde!"

No, wait a minute (heh), 10 inches wasn't nearly enough to explain this guy's problem. It had to have been _at least_ a full foot and a half, although, if it got much longer than that, it would practically be coming out of the beaver's mouth.

"It's-" Julian stopped himself before he could finish. _None of it leaves the house_ , he recalled. _Out here, to these people, I am still Nick._

But was he?

His head full of Nick's memories, and here he was at the same old dead-end job. He _had_ to be the jaded vulpine scumbag. Yet Nicholas Wilde had never _materialized_ a working collar key from memory. In other words, Nick was a real person, and Julian was utterly impossible, the man who seemed to be trapped in a dream, dragging the rest of the waking world with him.

Yet Julian was still here, although, in a way, he wasn't. On the train ride over, he'd been frustrated at everything and nothing, the sort of omnipresent angst that was as hard to pinpoint as it was to ignore. Although it was exacerbated by his dickish boss, it failed to coalesce around the beaver, as if Julian were mad at the world itself.

"Pipsqueak." He muttered, exploiting the beaver's subpar hearing as he walked to the other end of the small factory. Although that greedy shitstain went out of his way to antagonize the preds, they were the only mammals Nick's boss had ever seemed to hire, perhaps only because many of Julian's coworkers, like Nick had once been, were _desperate_ for money.

Julian, however, wasn't so sure if he cared about such things. The events of the previous...

 _Holy shit, has it even been a day?_

Be it Waking up beside the Seagrams Building, meeting the _abomination_ in the subway car, his epic quest to procure a toothbrush and his white-knuckle chase through the city, or even his apparent newfound talent as a magician, the impossible events of the last day had somehow distanced him from the world of Nicholas Wilde.

Yes, it was still him. He was still the same fox. He had to be. Why else would he be at this shithole factory, getting yelled at by some buck-toothed assface?

But he wasn't Nick. He couldn't be! Something was off, something was different, something he couldn't quite put his tongue on.

 **Something was pissing him off!**

Before the collars had ruined it (like they ruined everything), sex had been his favorite vice, and although neither Julian nor Nick before him were heavy smokers, the latter had certainly appreciated a relaxing drag or two from time to time, and the former, far too absorbed in his frustration to notice, materialized a cigarette and a chrome plated steel zippo from his pocket.

 _Boy, I could **really** use a smoke right about now._

At this exact moment, a young vixen with grease-stained blonde fur by the name of Skye had just cleaned her tools and taken her check, and was about to leave the factory. She'd spent the last 2 hours or so in a backroom, fixing a machine that had, at precisely this moment in time, been set on fire, the choreographed ballet of the billowing flames bringing a single speck of joy to the shadowy figure that stood in the darkness, admiring its latest handiwork as it slowly turned to exit the building.

"Hey Nick-" Clawhauser interjected, his tubby head and neck, strangulated by his collar, resembling some fucked-up kind of lollipop as he spoke. "-We missed you at the bar last night. Where were you?"

Finnick and Nick had been friends almost as long as Nick had known Honey, and they both knew each other to an extent. Clawhauser, however, had been a newcomer to Nick's circle of friends and acquaintances, and he had yet to be informed of the existence of Honey's collar key. So Julian lied. Not an outright fabrication, no. Nicholas had never been _quite_ that evil, and Julian was not aiming the beat the record. That being said, what truth he did tell was told in an incomplete and dishonest way. Although Julian knew he'd have one hell of an apology to give when the time came, he also knew that Clawhauser would understand: A working collar key necessitated _total_ secrecy. Exactly 5 people (counting Randall) knew of its existence, and that was 5 people too many.

"I wasn't in the mood."

"Bad day?"

"You wouldn't believe it." He said with a sigh, once again, telling _a_ truth. It was neither _the_ truth, nor the _whole_ truth, but, remembering his promise to Honey, and, figuring that Clawhauser would _not_ believe him if he told the truth, he kept lying. Or at least, he _would_ have kept lying, if it hadn't been for the harsh klaxon of the fire alarm that was now ringing in their ears, making both of their collars go red as it so rudely interrupted their conversation.

The hellish inferno that was the machine room was now visible from where Julian was standing.

"EVERYBODY OUT!"

* * *

By the time the fire department arrived, dousing nearby buildings was as much a priority as saving the bug-paste canning plant. Most of the city had burned to the ground in 1871, and it would be a cold day in hell (with free sno-cones provided) before the firefighters would allow that scenario repeat itself now. Come to think of it, they were one of the few _good_ things about the city: Pred or prey, fire was fire, and they put it out. Meanwhile, Clawhauser and Julian were standing out on the other side of the street, and, having grown bored of the smoke and steam that billowed endlessly from what remained of the factory, had resumed their conversation turned ironic smoke break.

"So, you were saying...something about a bad day?" Clawhauser asked.

"Pretty much." Julian deadpanned, as if he were trying to avoid talking about it. Come to think of it, that's exactly what he was trying to do, and as what was left of his cigarette had been smoked to near the butt, it wouldn't be long before he'd have to talk, uninterrupted.

"Well c'mon Nick, don't leave me hanging here! What happened?"

Julian paused, both to quell the cognitive dissonance that came from the usage of the old name, and to formulate a believable story that wasn't _completely_ false. Sure, he'd still be lying, but it wouldn't be quite as much of a lie, and to Julian, that mattered.

"Well, for one thing, I almost got mugged by a trio of wolves!"

Clawhauser was awestruck. "Holy crap, Nick! How'd you get away?!"

"Well-" Julian began in an attempt at drama "-somebody must've phoned the fuzz, 'cuz suddenly _the rabbit cop_ was on our tails. I cheesed it, and when we split, she chased them instead of me. Fortunately there was only one car." Well, up to the last sentence, it had been mostly true. Half of the city had been after him last night.

"Oh yeah, they were all probably chasing that other guy."

"What other guy?" He asked, knowing the answer.

"Nick, Are you serious? It was all over the news last night! Some jackass managed to get their collar off, and ran halfway across the city!" Clawhauser had inadvertently trampled all over the truth, having never suspected a thing. Excellent.

"And what happened?" Julian, despite being grimly aware of what his friend would answer, asked anyway.

"Oh, he got hit by a train. Dead as a fucking doornail."

Julian wasn't sure what bothered him more: the continued mis-use of the old name that he no longer felt was his, or having the story of his all too recent death eagerly repeated back to him, and he was now _even more desperate_ to change the subject, even if that meant small-talk with the boss, who was currently pacing back and forth on the pavement so fast that he'd probably end up wearing through to the ground and then digging a hole to China.

Although Julian suspected he wouldn't be the boss for much longer. No more factory? No more work.

"Uh...what do we do now? It's not like we _can_ get back to-"

The beaver snapped. " ** _You son of a bitch, Wilde! You did this! You fucking SAVAGES! ALL OF YOU! What the hell did we ever do to you God-damn chompers anyway?!_** "

 _Wow._ That was uncalled for, and Julian, for one, wasn't having any of it. As this guy was no longer (or, more precisely, would soon cease to be) his primary source of income, he saw no reason to remain silent, and commenced his diatribe.

"Well, you imprison us in these torture devices, you, and I do mean _you_ specifically, _constantly_ and _personally_ antagonize us left and right, and in spite of your omnihypocritical "harmony" act, you still treat us like dirt."

" _ **Well fuck you too! You're fired, in case you didn't know, so SCRAM!**_ "

In hindsight, the beaver's anguish was understandable. Capricious asshole or not, he wasn't exactly a rich man, and the factory represented most of his career and well over half of his net worth.

And it had all gone up in smoke.

(he also had child support bills to pay)

"Hey _pointy_ , are you deaf _and_ retarded?! I said **_SCRAM!_** "

Clawhauser and Julian both stood there, motionless. After a pause that felt like an eternity, Julian, after leaving a mental note to _deck_ this dick the next time he saw him, broke the ice.

"The bar?"

* * *

It was almost 8:30 in the morning now, and Julian and Clawhauser had just gotten off the bus, its ancient diesel engine roaring and moaning as it pulled away, said moans conveniently masking a certain high pitched whir that Julian only noticed moments before it struck.

He was suddenly overwhelmed by a scarlet tidal wave of twofold agony, drowning in the twin agonies from his tail and his collar, as the douchebag gerbils chuckled and celebrated this petty victory, the latest of their many attacks.

Nobody really knew what happened next...One moment they were there, laughing at his misery. The next, they and their fucking car were both skidding across the asphalt and tumbling straight into a storm drain with an all too audible splosh.

"Holy shit! Why'd you do that?!"

"Those bastards had it coming."

* * *

Finnick, understandably, couldn't stop laughing. He too had been tormented by the gerbils, who'd gone so far as to run over his feet.

Then the fucking collar ruined it for everybody at the table.

Unlike Nick, Finnick had never bothered to get "a real job," after the Harmony Act had been passed. Once upon a time, he'd smuggled LSD with Nick. Now, he was a proper mobster, complete with a properly tailored blacksuit and a pair of brass knuckles that could be described as "gently used". As a mobster, Finnick had no qualms with raining bottles upon those buck toothed cud chewing beady eyed assholes as they drove away in hysterics, and in the event that they ever came back, he kept a homemade mousetrap in his jacket pocket, which he was currently fidgeting with.

Like Nick, all those years ago, Finnick had an odd schedule. He'd just finished extorting a pair of skinheads who'd harassed The Komrade's pizza guy, and was passing the time at one of the _many_ mafia-owned establishments as he waited on a shipment of cement and cinderbricks that was scheduled to arrive at the bar's loading dock by ~9:10.

Never mind what they were using the concrete for, or who they were using it to drown. _That's none of your concern._

"So-" the little fox began, his accented voice still stained with post-shock resentment. "Whaddaya doing 'ere?"

"You know that factory where I work?"

"Let me guess, it was the union?"

Julian and Finnick, well aware of the nonexistent rights enjoyed by inner city preds, both knew the remark about the union was sarcastic. Indeed, it was one of the many running gags between him and Nick, and, like the others, Clawhauser was oblivious to it.

"Wait, we don't have a union." Said Clawhauser, causing both of the foxes to abruptly cease their chuckling.

"Yeah. 'Dat was the joke." Finnick's latest deadpan was not reassuring to Clawhauser.

"Nick, _who the hell is that guy?_ "

"Well, Clawhauser, allow me to introduce you to..."

"Jerry. Jerry Twoshoes." Like most mobsters, Finnick had an alias, and he only allowed a few people knew his real name.

" _Right._ " Clawhauser was not buying it.

"So as I saw saying...the factory?" Julian resumed.

"Yeah?"

"It's gone. Burned to the ground in a matter of minutes."

Finnick, who'd been sipping a beer, gently set it down as if he'd already known. He got up, went over to the payphone, dialed up Komrade Kolsov, and came back about 30 seconds later, this time looking genuinely shocked as he took another swig.

"It waddn't us. _He's_ as surprised as you were."

"Well whether or not it was arson, _we're_ out of a job, and I'm flat on my ass with no idea what to do next."

"You don't got no money?"

"Why'd you think I put up with Mr. Hardass for so long?"

"Dammit, how'd you ever get like this, anyway? I remember when we was living like...well, like people who ain't fucking _broke!_ I mean, you practically had a _mansion_ for god's sake!"

It wasn't a mansion, but to Finnick, anything bigger than a townhouse might as well have been.

"And to think I'd been looking forward to The Harmony Act...and then they killed my smuggling business and left me to rot in _this_ thing." Julian sighed, tugging at his collar to accentuate his point.

"To the future." Finnick grumbled.

Both foxes chugged.

"No. _Fuck_ the future." Julian resumed what was now becoming a rant, as all three of their collars went yellow.

"30 years ago, when we were kids, do you know what they told us? They said we'd have goddamn _jetpacks_ by now, and what happened? All we've got are collars."

"And just you wait-" sneered Finnick "-It'll be _even worse_ 30 years from now. Idunno how, but they'll find a way to make it worse. They _always_ do."

A hyena in a white shirt with a black vest gently tapped Finnick's shoulder, whispering in his ear.

"Oh...I gotta' go. It was fun seeing you, Nick."

* * *

 _ **Ra-ta-ta-tat-ta-ta-t-t-tat**_

Honey opened her door and was twofold surprised by Julian, both in the sense that he shouldn't have been here at this hour, and in fact that he was somehow even _more_ miserable now than he had been when he'd left for work.

"Shouldn't you be at work?"

"I got fired."

"...Really?"

"Well the factory also burned to the ground, so there's that...Did Randall ever show up while I was gone?"

In response, the Randall's body fell from the sky, his left foot hooking on the gutter, ripping it from the roof line and sending him tumbling like a Gmod ragdoll as he face-planted in the bushes beside Honey's door before bouncing into the yard.

"Nope." The android deadpanned.

"Randall?"

"Yes Julian?"

"Why...do you really _have_ to do all this crap _every_ time you show your face?"

"Crap is a noun, Julian. _You know this._ " For added comedic effect, his body, which was still lying in Honey's yard, burst into flames.

Julian turned to gaze upon Honey's townhouse, and unfolded a stepladder to climb up and get a closer look at the property damage. Seeing where the nails had been ripped from the wood, he grabbed a hammer from his back pocket.

"Julian-"

"What? It's not like I've got anything better to do, Honey."

"Where'd you get the ladder? And the hardhat?"

"Ahh!" Randall, who was no longer on fire, was currently attempting to strike a seductive pose on Honey's rooftop. "You're beginning to learn to use your set! _Good!_ "

Suddenly, all of the property damage was gone. The gutters were where they were meant to be, and the bushes were un-crushed, not a twig out of place.

"But you still have much to learn."

Julian descended the step ladder and headed inside. Now that the gutters were fixed, there was nothing to distract him from the black demon, and the sooner he got that fucking collar off, the better. He continued to descend into the basement, where the aforementioned collar seemingly went orange at the very sight of the shoebox full of identical collar keys that Honey had temporarily placed on her workbench.

Grabbing one of the many keys in the box, Julian found, much to his relief, that it worked. He was about to set it down, when a much naughtier thought invaded his head.

 _Take it._

Nicholas Wilde had been a smuggler for years, but he'd refused to join the mob. Law breaker or not, in his mind, there'd been a _big_ difference between felony by accomplice of a victimless crime, and literally beating a mammal to within an inch of their life for their pocket change.

Which Finnick had done.

 _Twice._

Julian, however, held few reservations. Freed again of the collar, he began to truly understand exactly how much he hated those things, and how important it was that he stayed out of them as much as possible.

And if that meant stealing a key (admittedly, one of many), then so be it.

Having accomplished both of his goals, he went back upstairs to find Randall and the others staring at the TV, which was currently displaying news coverage of the aftermath of the fire that had claimed the factory.

"...Officials cannot rule out arson at this time."

"Bullshit-" Interjected Julian, as he took his seat. "-Neither Finnick nor The Komrade knew of it, and my boss was a cheap bastard-no way he'd cough up enough for insurance."

The face of police chief Bogo appeared on the screen. "Perhaps..." he deadpanned "...if we increased collar sensitivity, they wouldn't have gotten so worked up as to light up a factory. _Damn chompers_."

The chief's patently bigoted remarks elicited a pronounced groan from everybody in the room, and a lecture from Randall, who didn't seem to care that he was talking over the rest of the so-called "report".

"It seems the chief has committed three fallacies at once: He assumes it's arson, he blames in on a group that only represents 9.81% of Zootopia's population, and he then assumes that the presumed predator was emotionally disturbed when they did it, yet he is not justified in making any one of them. It's almost impressive."

Ironically, (as we may or may not soon find out) the chief had been right on all three counts, although not in the way that he, nor anybody else for that matter, had imagined at the time.

Julian was starting to find that, much like Nick, he didn't care much for the news, and was rapidly growing tired of the racist propaganda onscreen that was as depressing as it was boring. In his boredom, he began to wander, finding an old, burgundy book with gold-foil lettering on one of Honey's shelves. Taking it back down to the basement, he began reading.

It was an old book of fairytales, and Julian soon found himself lost within its pages.

* * *

Jeremy Fischer, a slender, North American grey fox, was curled up and mostly asleep in his nest under the roof of his old hut, as a lone ray of sunlight danced its way onto his face, tickling his nose in its heat.

Startled awake by that sunbeam, Fischer was now hastily examining his hut for intruders, and, upon realizing that there were none, set his now roused self to the task of devising yet more rabbles to rouse, and every other sort of tomfuckery with which to swindle, deceive, con, or otherwise trouble the poor residents of Cransburry.

Jeremy Fischer, one of the many of his kind who haunted the seedy underbelly of medieval Britain (never mind how an American fox got there in the first place), had somehow managed to evade the attention of the authorities, both through a somewhat nomadic lifestyle, and by sticking to the small fry, the petty thefts that put food on your plate (and unfortunately, not much else).

As his eyes came upon his jacket, he noted with glee that he'd stumbled upon the key to the chest of a local lorde, having won it in a game of Cribbage. Feudalism and all, this key could fetch him quite a pretty hay-penny.

With a soft _harrumph_ , Jeremy Fischer set off to steal the booty, stepping out of his hut and entering Honey's basement through the now open refrigerator.

 _Oh golly gee!_ Thought Jeremy Fischer.

 _Oh by the golly gee!_ Mused Jeremy Fischer.

 _Oh by the golly gee whatever could this be?_ Wondered Jeremy Fischer.

 _Oh by the golly gee whatever in the wide world could this be? Am I in reality?_ Pontificated Jeremy Fischer in an increasingly verbose tone.

 _And what have I come across in this real world? 'Tis a box of collar keys! Surely the greatest booty there is! Methinks I'll just take that and run along...ha ha!_ Schemed Jeremy Fischer, who, until now, had been a fictional character.

Yet here he was, sprung forth from a subconscious whim of a bored fox, and materialized by a computerized eldritch abomination. And there he went, stealing the shoebox full of collar keys, for no reason other than the lack of a better thing to be doing.

* * *

Julian, being rather absorbed in his book, only noted what had happened when he heard Honey scream. He had just enough time to get to the window and witness Jeremy Fischer, straight out of his book and on the street, running away _with the box of the collar keys tucked under his shoulder_.

"Fuck."

* * *

Author's note: Just thinking about that beaver makes me want to write some _really_ gay shit.

Also, I am well aware that my usage of "racist" makes little sense within the context of Zystopia. That being said, "speciesist" (speciest?) is hard to spell, makes the story _less_ readable for its intended human audience (the same reason why I favor "hands" over "paws") and, to be completely honest, sounds about as stupid to me as "anypony."

Not that I'm a brony. It's just a noteworthy and somewhat self-evident example.

EDIT: The shadowy figure who set the factory on fire is notSkye...and we will be seeing more of _it_ in the next few chapters...maybe...I'm playing this one by ear, so we'll see.

EDIT 2: Silly me...revealing plot twists too early... (a note to myself somehow made it into the text. It has been removed.)


	6. Soggy Toast and Betamax Porno

Be warned: this chapter contains more borderline-insane narration. It's not going away anytime soon, so get used to it. Or not.

* * *

When a general dreams, you get a coup d'état

When the people dream, tengas una revolución. (you get a revolution)

When artists dream, you get the works of gods.

When engineers dream, they build rockets and H-bombs.

When the singularity dreams, oh boy, you _better_ get ready.

* * *

Dawn Bellwether was seated on a gold-plated duralumin throne that had been polished to a very distinctive #4 architectural finish, and subsequently placed atop a roughly pyramid-shaped pile of lead-beryllium alloy statues that had been exquisitely carved and painted to resemble the Cliffside nurses, each one with a pair of bloodied ice-picks protruding from their eyes. The actual nurses (complete with the ice picks) were in neon cyan chains beneath her throne, sobbing hysterically as they endlessly shuffled in circles by the crack of a floating whip that wasn't quite sentient. In their agony, the enslaved nurses pushed a set of rods connected to a jade bearing that slowly rotated the entire pyramid beneath a pulsating sky that oscillated between burgundy and ochre like the tent of a circus was having a seizure.

At the foot of all this nonsense, an encampment of Cliffside inmates, each dressed in absurdly oversaturated geometric shapes that would've felt at home sometime in the mid 2030's, were busy frolicking, dueling, or otherwise role-playing their supposed lives as medieval townspersons, the sheep with the nixie tube eyes (who was playing the role of scribe) was currently, as instructed, banging its head against a gong with a random period in the range of [(1+(1/11)),((1+sqrt(5))/2)] seconds.

And from the distance, overpowering the sobs of the nurses and the rackets and beats of the gong, they heard a what'cha'khad-zummer, as a strange little pig stepped out from a hummer.

The pig was dressed in ultramarine blue hat and robes, each bedazzled with enough sequins to give your average kindergartner a heart attack.

"Merlllihn? i'Tiz theest?"

"Yeah, sure. _Whatever._ "

"Merlllihn" as he was now christened (he was pretty sure it was some form of _Merlin_ ), had successfully pretended to be insane in order to escape jail time, and, despite being the only sane man remaining in the entire building, had been perfectly willing to go along with...whatever the hell this was. As far as he could tell, he and Bellwether were _supposed_ to be arch enemies...Although Bellwether had seen to it that, no matter what happened, they'd _always_ and _invariably_ end up fucking each other silly at the end of the episode, as if this were some kind of porno.

And to be honest, for Merlllihn, an oryx with no interests _whatsoever_ in interspecies romance, fucking the sheep was arguably the hardest part of...existing...here. Even harder than putting up with the floating clowns, sentient chessboards, sideways gravities, and all the other crazy shit that tended to get conjured up in Dawn Bellwether's la-la-land.

But at least it wasn't boring.

"Haveth'st thou arrrived four thatso dastardly intent ovf whiche thou'st are't pontificating within your stomach? Even Iy cann smell thye intention to spitith in my söada..."

Bellwether took a sip from a toroidal glass that was vaguely in the shape of an erupting volcano, the glass itself containing Crystal Pepsi, a drink so strange that it caused her to momentarily break character.

"What the fuck is this stuff?"

The scribe answered without even slowing down, the android's head still faithfully impacting the gong. This did make her answer hard to hear, but nevertheless, she somehow made it heard that it was a glass of Crystal Pepsi.

""This may just be the strangest thing I have ever seen." Said Bellwether, as a clown-makeup wearing blue meanie with USB ports for eyes, mouths in its shoes, and shoes in its mouth stormed past me, crying tears of old molars that rattled on the ground like dropped change before growing into white toothfruit trees, as the blue meanie itself rode past on a barking, bleeding tricycle made _entirely_ from rusty nails that squirmed and wiggled as if they were worms, the tricycle somehow travelling sideways, skidding more than rolling as it made its way down a path that, despite being made of bricks a mere 10 seconds ago, had dissolved into boiling ice, _with glitter_ , which of course was getting everywhere." Said Henry, an inmate who was currently attempting to usurp my position as narrator.

Nevertheless, Henry's description was mostly accurate, in spite of the fact that his mouth had suddenly sewn itself shut with a wire made from John Lennon's nasty old toenail clippings.

Do not try to usurp the narrator, kids. It never ends well.

* * *

Julian was on his knees, gazing upon the not-quite-brand-new Betamax player that sat beneath the TV with a sense of corrupted awe.

Sure, Honey was out of her mind, hoarding electronic knickknacks and conspiracy theories alike.

But that also meant she was one of the only people Julian knew who, _in 1973_ , owned a VCR.

He pressed the "eject" button, marveling as the tray slowly and smoothly opened, as if it were a butler holding a platter. "Your tape, sir?" it almost said, the tape itself being equally striking: Artsy and asymmetric, a single circular window revealing the inner workings like the interface panel of that psycho computer in that trippy-ass space movie he'd seen that one time back in '68 when he'd smuggled some LSD into the theater with Finnick, so that by the time Dave had ventured into the monolith itself, half of what Nick had been seeing was probably in his own head (not that the other half was any less psychedelic, but still).

Unfortunately, it seemed that Finnick did not enjoy tripping balls while watching a trippy-ass space movie.

Even more unfortunate than that, it was the last time they'd gotten high together before the collars had been introduced.

And since that day neither Nick nor Julian had touched anything stronger than whiskey, and they certainly hadn't gotten laid. Not that Nick hadn't tried, but with those fucking collars, there was just no way: You could either spend a two hours coaxing your dick into a lackluster cum-sneeze, or you'd literally die trying for a decent orgasm. Suffice it to say, the month or so after the Harmony Act went into effect had been one of the worst months of Nick's life.

Julian's collar went yellow, for whatever reason. Perhaps it was a moralizing prude, objecting to the four-letter-word, to the _hanky-panky_.

Not that it mattered: The collar was currently sitting on a coffee table in the center of the room, alongside Julian's key, the very same one he'd pocketed before Jeremy poofed into existence and stole them all. Julian himself was far too focused on other matters at the moment to notice the momentary beeping of his black pestilence.

Julian's heart skipped a beat as he slid the tape into the tray, and in a way, he felt just _a bit_ guilty about the whole affair. The little wood-grained box that sat before him was arguably the pinnacle of early 1970's Zootopian technology, a small electromechanical miracle that represented decades upon decades of research and development in many fields of science: Plastics in the buttons, semiconductors for just about all of the parts, materials science to manufacture the storage media, particle physics for the TV on which it was displayed (and especially for the camera through which it had been filmed).

In other words, Julian was about to masturbate on the shoulders of giants. It was a few minutes before 3:00 AM, and the fox was sliding a sleazy, unlabeled porno into Honey's VCR. Of course, the tape, the machine, and (to a lesser extent) almost everything else in the room were all immaculately clean, but it still inexplicably felt _dirty_ , as if simply having the tape _near_ the machine somehow polluted it all. 'Twas the same sort of guilt over the same sort of filth he'd been lectured about in church, dominated and driven by the same sort of childish absolutism wherein a single _drop_ of sin is enough to literally condemn all of mammalia, forever.

Because it was _totally_ OK to hold a man personally accountable for things done thousands of years before they were born. As a predator, who had been, _to the very last day,_ systematically oppressed as if he were still a cannibalizing monster, Julian West and Nicholas Wilde before him both knew a thing or two about being guilty of the crimes of someone else...and that be it cannibalism or original sin, it was still complete bullshit.

Although Julian's mind, lacking in recent churchgoing and unconstrained by the black demon, was free to be far too horny to care, and dismissed those feelings in favor of some other feeling that had been forcibly dismissed for far too long. He turned on the TV, wincing as the initially loud high pitched whine temporarily filled the room before subsiding. Then, hesitating for a second as he crossed the point of no return, he pressed "play," took a seat on the chair, and reached for his fly.

At first he'd been excited...then he'd been almost _giddy_ , as the two protagonists met. Several minutes later, it dawned on Julian that this was a proper work of _erotic fiction_ , one that had actually put some effort into its plot and character development, and that he wouldn't get to _the good part_ for many more minutes.

Taking care to use his _other_ hand, he pressed "fast forward" on the VCR, sighing in annoyance as the blue screen that confronted him now killed what remained of his erection (early VCR's couldn't fast forward _and_ view the tape simultaneously). About 7 seconds of fast forwarding later, he pressed "play" again, this time without all the guilt (it seemed as if that novelty had already worn off, as they usually did in his experience), and was immediately rewarded by the sight of the protagonists fucking each other silly in some high-class hotel room.

 _Yes._

Just as Julian had finally begun to enjoy himself, moreso than he had done in years, the VCR let out a grimace inducing buzz-growl as the screen went staticky and corrupted, before angrily spitting out a smoking and chewed up tape onto the floor, where it shattered to bits with a notable ruckus.

"Well, shit-"

Julian was interrupted as the Betamax player itself burst into flames, the TV loudly imploding in a cloud of phosphorescent dust several seconds later as shards of glass leapt for his face.

* * *

Julian, still barenecked, came to on a bench, dispelling the nightmare almost immediately. It didn't take long, however before he became acutely aware that _something_ was wrong.

But he had no idea what.

It seemed midsummer afternoon here, the grass a sort of vibrant green that Julian rarely glimpsed in the city, dappled with shadows from the old oak trees that towered over his head.

As he ambled down the mulch path, the domineering sounds of his own footsteps were slowly displaced by a very subtle roar, like that of a waterfall. Yet no such waterfall was to be found within the park, and aside from a nigh-incorporeal laughing sound that seemed to teleport and wisp around like a naughty poltergeist, there were no signs of people here, either. Yet the roaring persisted, the source of the noise revealed merely to be a water fountain.

A very, very strange water fountain.

Perhaps the strangest such fountain that Julian or Nicholas before him had ever seen.

For one thing, something that looked like water was being dispensed from the nozzle, even though nobody was there to drink it. Furthermore, this substance, far from arcing in a contiguous jet, had split, diverging into many distinct parabolas as it went up and down, forming a veritable whitewater rapid as the discordant streams tumbled into the drain. On closer inspection, quite a few of the parabolic streams were abruptly truncated, a thinner remnant of the water sloppily dripping and dropping back down to the drain, the rest vanishing with the most peculiar of slurping sounds that was half there, half not.

Out of sheer force of habit, his left hand reached for the polished cylindrical chromium button, only to find that it was already being pressed, only to find that it wasn't being pressed. No, I did not contradict myself just there, for indeed the button, itself a hazy glimmer of silver, was flickering and scintillating in a state of superposition as it pressed and released simultaneously, never in any one place yet always in 20 or more.

Never mind the fountain, Julian wasn't all that thirsty to begin with. What troubled him most was not the fountain, but his utter solitude. Even standing before a fountain that seemed as if it were being used by a small army all at once, to the point where wisps of force kept shoving him too and fro, he couldn't see anyone...until he did.

For but a second, the button converged upon a solid state, and the hazy form of a young bobcat appeared at the fountain, slurping from a now unified arc of water, although the collars that adorned his necks had failed to unify, and oscillated from an oval form with three indicator lights to a rectangular one with a lone bulb and every other sort of collar imaginable.

And then he was gone, the cat replaced by a cloud of smoke, yet the smoke itself remained confined to distinct silhouettes, as if Bobby Catmull had not discorporated at all, but had merely gone their separate ways. Indeed, there were now a multitude of transparent Bobby's walking away in all directions, splitting again and again until they faded to a nearly invisible state. And as Julian squinted, trying to make them out, he noticed the others.

The park was not empty, not even close. The transparent entities, the see-through people, were everywhere, and a small army of them were now clipping through each other at the fountain, each and every single one of them pushing the button as they saw fit.

He turned and ambled away from the fountain, towards where he neither knew nor cared. As he took in the sights of this park, all of it seeming just a bit too good to be true, he noted a trash can, the garbage within in a state of superposition, very much like the button on the fountain. Once upon a time, Nicholas Wilde had been rich enough to have his own newspaper subscription. More recently, he'd made a habit out of dumpster-diving for them. Sure, he was always a few days behind, but there were more pressing things to spend his money on. So he reached into the flickering mess, and seeing a more solid looking newspaper, he grabbed it.

Upon grabbing the paper he felt quite a shock as the paper schismed into 20 nigh-invisible permutations, the copy he held yanking him through the most confounding tunnel, despite not moving him at all, and he soon fell flat on his face, still clutching the paper as they began screaming. He got up just in time to see the crowd, now _very_ solid indeed, running away from the barenecked fox in their midst, a handful of predators longingly staring before they themselves fled, not in fear of him, but in fear of being deemed guilty by standing near him. A rhino was talking with a small grey thing pressed up against his face, before he himself folded it in half and fled the scene several seconds later. Yet Julian was not concerned with such matters. He'd woken up in a strange park and seen the schrodinger's water fountain, and was still convinced that this was a dream.

This conviction was only vindicated as he thumbed through the paper, failing to recognize or contextualize what he saw in the pages. Surely this paper was mistaken? It had to be, why else would it think the mayor's name was _Lewis?_ Last time he'd checked, _Johnston_ was the mayor.

Perhaps this was an old paper? That would explain the inaccuracy, but Julian couldn't recall _any_ mayor, then or now, who went by Lewis, and even if there had been such a Lewis many years prior, the paper hadn't yellowed at all, as if it hadn't even been printed a week ago. And it certainly wouldn't be in a trash can if it were that old, no, it would be in an archive, a museum, perhaps.

Although he had considered past and present, the third option had remained utterly unturned, to reference the old saying on the subject of the revolution of stones, and upon checking the date on the front page, Julian nearly shit a brick.

 ** _-=AUGUST 3rd, 2004=-_**

He now looked 'round the park, this time carefully scanning every last detail he could find. Many of the taller buildings were the same, but the people were not: The mammals wore different clothing, listened to very different music that seemed utterly alien to Julian, and played with different toys, small plastic things with buttons that beeped and booped. Indeed, such a thing had been used to summon the police.

Julian could vaguely hear a siren approaching, glimpsing the SWAT cars as they got closer. _Crap_.

He bolted, running for the hills, both in the metaphorical sense in that he was running away, and in the literal sense of running towards the actual hills near the edge of the park. He dashed across the street, barely missing a rather peculiar looking taxicab that was smaller and rounder than any car he'd ever seen. Yet such cars seemed to be everywhere here, as if the world was running out of gasoline, which he grimly noted sold for almost $2.00 a gallon, and as he ran through the city, things, such as the large, flat screens he saw in an electronics store, only got stranger still.

And then the SWAT car, streamlined like the others, rounding the corner and cut off his path of escape, more cars filing in from the other end. From these cars poured the razorbacks, armed to the teeth with tasers, tranquilizers, bullet-guns and wire nooses on poles.

And then they halted, abruptly, and seemingly without reason. Surely an entire squad of heavily armed razorbacks weren't _that_ afraid of _one_ bareneck fox?

It was then that Julian heard the distant roar of the sirens. A child of the cold war, its ethereal sound had been burned into his brain, and it sent a shiver down his spine.

The razorbacks, meanwhile, literally dropped everything and _ran_ back to their cars, speeding away fast as they could, the shrieking air raid siren only getting louder.

A slamming door from the left came to Julian's attention: A beaver (presumably the owner) had fled the electronics store, and a very worrying headline flashed its way across the 52-inch plasma-screen TV posed in the window:

 ** _A_ _NUCLEAR ATTACK HAS BEEN LAUNCHED AGAINST THE CITY OF ZOOTOPIA: ALL MAMMALS ADVISED TO SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS NOT A TEST._**

And all around him, chaos ensued: more runners, more screaming, doors slamming shut and the squealing of tires on the streets. The beaver ran right past Julian, not even noticing his uncollared neck. As far back as he scanned through Nick's memories, this had never happened. Prey _always_ noticed their absence, yet this man didn't seem to care. For once, Julian the fox was no longer the scariest thing in the room.

That honor had been stolen by a dim, shimmering star that hovered over the city, slowly, inexorably descending at over 13,000 miles per hour as it gradually got brighter and brighter.

Here it was, in a different sky, launched by a different people, yet in a way it was exactly the same: a warmongerer angered, a button pressed, a missile launched, a warhead deployed, and millions upon millions of people being vaporized and utterly annihilated in the resulting hellfire.

"And just you wait-" sneered Finnick "-It'll be _even worse_ 30 years from now. Idunno how, but they'll find a way to make it worse. They _always_ do."

These were the words that rang in my ears as this world around me ended, its people uttering one final scream as the atom bomb melted the flesh from their bones, predator and prey finally equal in total annihilation.

Tick tock says the sun, and what now shall we play?

Tick tock drop the bomb, our pain has gone away.

Here comes the sun, to purge the world in one final blaze.

Here comes the sun, dare I say, to finally make _them_ pay.

Can you feel it? Even they cannot stop the summer now!

His judgement, the wrath of the screaming bomb, falls upon their city, what a glorious sight!

Even the blackest of their evils cannot withstand the atomic light!

Be free, little ones, break the bonds that hold you down and fly away!

Be free, my friends, break the chains that hold you down and fly away!

I too will join you soon, my ashes adrift in the nuclear storm.

From the rubble I rise, a figure black as night, strange as can be yet familiar all the same, a growing feeling of utter dream overwhelmed the brief ecstasy that might not have been mine.

void Id(){

char Charlie[] = "Tick tock, drop the bomb, now all the photons fly.";

char The[] = "Tick tock, says the sun, now watch them scream and cry.";

char Madman[] = "Tick tock, goes the bomb, now you and I must die.";

printf(Charlie, The, Madman);

}

Thus spoke the midnight fox, his eyes glowing as the blood moon glows, as we stared into the depths of our souls. I was he, he was me, the darkness consuming what remained of this world, a sticky black tar, runny as ink and reeking of blood, was now covering everything, running its way into every last orifice it could find as the corruption consumed it all.

Tick tock, drop the bomb, now watch me scream and cry. _What a joyous day!_

I awoke from the nightmare, still on the couch in Honey's basement. The black demon still sitting on the coffee table, my collar key still in my pocket, the betamax player and the television both in working order and right on the shelf where they were supposed to be.

It was all a dream, of course. _52-inch televisions, how absurd!_

But how could it possibly have been a dream? I was already tired, and it had all felt so real to me, the unmistakable taste of iron from the "nightmare" was still in my mouth. And as time passed, my horror at what I had seen only increased, the images reverse-fading, their contorted agonies growing clearer and more painfully vivid by the second. I curled up on the couch, pressing a pillow to my ears as if I could block them out, but the missile only screamed louder, a wispy black figure now forcing his way into my mind's eye and jabbing radioisotope razorblades into my head! Its eyes were on fire, the bomb was on fire, the people were on fire, the _everything_ was on fire! the bomb was now coughing up a maggot-ridden blackened pus, the pus itself laughing maniacally as it devoured me alive!

It was 1:00 AM or so and I simply could not take it anymore. The thoughts that were still my own (as if the others were not) turned back to my apartment, to an old Vangellis record I kept on a shelf. It was the last remnant of my once formidable wealth, and the throbbing of its notes brought a certain nostalgic tranquility to my mind like little else does. If it couldn't banish the radioactive demon, then nothing could, and 1:00 AM or not, I was going to go get it before their laughter drove me insane.

* * *

Sunday, November 18th, 1973. 1:07 AM.

Somewhere in Happytown.

Nicky stood at the boxy chrome-plated toaster, placed atop an old pink formica countertop on one side of a relatively unfinished room in one of the more run-down buildings in Happytown. He stared intently at it, as if doing so made it go faster. Vinny and Tony were off to the side, smoking one cigarette between the two of them and talking shit about Deborah Wilker's pussy. Tony was a bit of a womanizer, Todd was a borderline sociopath and an all around asshole, and Nicky your generic tough guy who didn't know who Deborah Wilker was, didn't give a shit about Deborah Wilker, and had probably been beaten once or twice by his old man. Per week.

None of them were truly irredeemable, and all three of them were up to no good. They'd soon be out and about, selling off some cocaine to the snobby prey in their penthouses before spraying some racist graffiti on the walls of some alley somewhere and throwing bottles at anybody who got too close.

The toaster, having finished toasting, proceeded to eject the bread so hard that it arced several inches above the toaster, before flopping right back down off of the counter and onto the floor. Shrugging as he grumbled some incoherent string of syllables that vaguely resembled some sort of profanity, Nicky picked the toast, which was now thoroughly covered in all sorts of filth, off of the floor, rinsed it out under the nearest faucet, rung it dry as if it were a towel, and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth in one go. Being the sort of guy who smoked other people's cigarette buts at bars without actually ordering anything, Nicky could, off the top of his head, name 5 things he'd done that were worse than _rinsing a dropped piece of toast and eating it_. In just the last week, too.

Having finished this ghetto-y breakfast, Nicky ambled over to Vinny and Tony.

"Ya'got 'da crack?"

"Yeah." Somehow, the cigarette was the _only_ part of Tony that moved, at all, when he answered. It was a skill he'd refined over more than a decade of practice.

"Right." Nicky pulled a rusty red crowbar from his beat up grey jacket and passed it to Vinny. "Let's get outta' here."

And so they turned to leave the room, forgetting to shut off the lights as they did so. Because they were _those_ kinds of people.

And not even 10 seconds later, they were getting their asses handed to them by Todd, Kyle, and Tucker, the bear, the coyote and the bobcat, each armed with baseball bats or lead pipes, easily beating the shit out of the three rams. Before leaving, Tucker paused to snatch the cocaine. There was no fucking way any of these dipshits were actually under the umbrella of a competently organized mafia, and as they had metaphorically ripped their assholes inside out, and as the coke was probably valuable, Tucker figured he'd take it. About an hour later, he'd discover that he'd been wrong about the coke: it was mostly flour, meant to fool some newbie dealer.

Julian, meanwhile, idly walked past all of this without even batting an eye. He was fine with this sort of stuff, and why wouldn't he be? So long as lots of little felonies were going on in the background, one could be relatively sure that they weren't planning something. In a way, if he _hadn't_ witnessed a mugging tonight, he would've been worried. Although he wasn't especially happy. His goddamn collar had seen to _that_. Even when it wasn't shocking him, it subtly yet profoundly angered Julian, like nails on the chalkboard of his soul.

Yet as he crossed the bridge that separated Happytown from the rest of the city, even the black demon seemed to be at ease, and to an extent, so too was Julian, the latter taking a rather roundabout route that was as much a directionless quest for fresh air as it was a trip to his apartment.

And then he found himself rounding a corner and coming face to face with the Seagrams building, as monolithic and black as ever, especially at 1:39 in the morning. As a vague sense of despair came upon him, Julian's heart skipped a beat, and his collar punished him accordingly. His left hand went lunging for his neck in an instant, brutally tearing it from his neck and slamming it onto the concrete sidewalk in the blink of an eye.

"Fuck this thing! Randall was right..."

Julian West was no longer in the mood for fresh air, and he took off for his apartment. He needed that damn record!

* * *

Halfway across the city, some asshole in a black hoodie had just robbed a bank, and Judy was chasing him down. The dented red pickup truck rounded a corner, Judy barely a second behind.

"Stop in the name of the law!"

Yet the truck continued, right up through the lowered crossing gates and straight into the path of a freight train barreling down the tracks at over 60 miles per hour. The resulting collision crushed the the truck and cast it aside as though it were an empty tin can meeting the steel toed boot of an angry teen who'd just broken up and was mad at the world itself, the truck botching a sideways landing and rolling for almost 17 meters before coming to a stop, where it proceeded to burst into flames.

20 minutes later, the train had resumed its trip, the fires had been mostly put out, and _not a trace_ of the driver was to be found anywhere on or near the car, as if he had vanished into thin air.

* * *

Author's note: Sorry if you got offended by the narration during Julian's nightmare. Julian has already been established as an atheist character, and as I was making my final revisions to this chapter, I realized that the Christian doctrines of original sin and total depravity were disturbingly similar to the ever present Zystopian fear of "savage" mammals...and I simply couldn't resist drawing the parallels.

Reviews would be appreciated, thank you for reading!

EDIT: a few commas, some formatting, and one or two minor tweaks to the prose. Nothing that changes the plot, I swear.


	7. The Chase

"The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist knows it." -Robert J. Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb.

* * *

Raymond's headless corpse sat in a growing puddle of blood, dead as a-

Oh, sorry, wrong fanfic.

* * *

Julian, now thoroughly haunted by his jaunt through an end of a world, stood in front of his apartment door, surprisingly indecisive under the circumstances.

He hadn't walked this hall barenecked in...well, _ever_ , actually. Nick had lived in a decent house once upon a time, and had only rented the apartment _after_ the ratification of the Harmony Act. At any rate, whether or not the saying was technically wrong, as he had never walked this place barenecked, it remained true in the broader sense that he hadn't been...Actually, he _had_ been barenecked quite a bit these last few days, although the novelty still hadn't fully worn off, and he sure as hell wasn't putting the collar back on anytime soon if he could help it.

OK, just forget it. Idioms aside, he was still slightly worried about what they'd do if anybody saw him.

Had he already been seen? Was he already a wanted man?

Yet deep down, this voice of caution was countered by something else. For within Julian there echoed a voice of a different sort of someone, the someone who did not care about cops and handcuffs and yearned for bigger things, the sort of someone who considered the collar a far greater nuisance, and someone else still who saw the cops as little more than punching bags, should they choose to get in the way.

Yet somehow he felt that opening Nick's door made this more real, that it would significantly increase his chances of being caught. Perhaps he thought this because the door was squeaky. But whether or not it woke up the whole damn city, there was something of far greater importance at stake, something that Julian simply had to get.

And there it sat on the player, waiting patiently in the darkness of Nick's apartment. Julian did not bother to turn the lights on, the handful of dull orange photons from an arc-sodium streetlight below and the inherited memories of Nicholas Wilde more than sufficed to navigate the small room.

Julian powered up the record player, placed the headphones _into_ the cavernous triangular cartilage structures that were his ears, and set the needle into its groove. From the soft static rose the ethereal synths and the primordial beats of _Creation du Monde_ , and Julian soon found himself losing himself, both to the inner darkness of his slumbering mind, and in the more literal darkness of the apartment.

As he slept for the second time that night, an old and possibly false memory belonging to Nicholas made itself heard. The year was 1949, and professor J. Lumen Lightly was giving him a guided tour of an incandescent light bulb.

"Fascinating stuff, really. See how tightly the filament is coiled? A coil _within_ a coil, indeed! It's practically a wolfram ballet."

"Doesn't look so beautiful to me."

"Oh" said the professor. "Now What makes you say that? It's glowing red like a Christmas light!"

" _It's a tame collar_. When it glows red, there is only misery and pain. No offense, but I don't think _any_ sort of lightbulb can fix this."

"Well perhaps not _one_ bulb by itself, but surely _they_ can! See how this strand of Christmas lights bridges the electrodes?"

The collar went off, causing his neck to briefly resemble a Christmas tree. The bulbs, sympathetic to his plight, were shining brilliantly as they consumed most of the volts, collectively sharing the burden so that he might be spared.

"Lightbulbs are my specialty, you know, and as they are the means of my ends, I must creatively use them to advance my agenda. You too have your own means, and if I were you I would not be so hesitant to try them out, _lest you leave your ends unaccomplished_."

"Must I, professor?"

"Tell me, Julian: Is inaction not itself a permutation of action? Is guilt by inaction _not_ guilt?"

Now they stood in the city center: a runaway trolley with the atom bomb in a passenger seat hovering less than 10 feet off the ground and looming over their heads with its promise of hellfire on Earth, yet completely frozen in place and time and as peaceful as could be, like the calm before the mutually assured annihilation of the world. Before Julian there was an old fashioned brake lever, beckoning for his hand.

"People think that evil slips under their noses, that _if only_ they had known they would've done _something_ about it, when in reality they all too often let it walk right past them _and_ their open eyes."

The fox and his shadow both reached for the lever, but what was going to become of it, the three of them did not know.

* * *

4:57 AM, somewhere on the streets of Zootopia.

Judy wasn't exactly in trouble. She couldn't be reasonably blamed any more than anyone else in the ZPD: Just about everyone had been after the barenecked foxes, and both of them had vanished in the rail yard without a trace. 24 hours had come and gone, and now Officer Hopps (along with most of the ZPD) was desperately combing the city for them. But why was she looking for them here, in what was arguably the most well-off part of the city? The savages would _surely_ be hiding in Happytown, right?

"I don't think they'd be hiding _there_ , sir." Judy had said

"And Capone never thought we'd get 'em on _tax evasion_. It doesn't hurt to _look_ , officer, lest your prejudices get in the way of your job." Bogo may have been a stubborn asshole, but even as he neared retirement, he was still sharp as a tack.

"Very well, sir." Judy conceded.

"Now is no time for pleasantries! There are _savages_ on the loose!"

And on those orders she was here, driving by the Seagrams building on the hunt for the rogue chompers. With the exception of two drums and a cymbal that had been thrown out of the a high-rise window to accentuate the irony in Bogo's remarks, the city was oddly quiet at this time of night, the otherwise vibrant night life of downtown Zootopia shut down by fear. Indeed, the sidewalks were almost completely devoid of-

 _What is that?_ Thought Judy, her cognitive stirrings somehow derailing my narration. But the train of thought had not been interrupted in vain, for indeed, she had seen somethi-

"Bucky, I see something."

 _Goddammit_...Anyway, she put on her hazards, and stopped the car.

"Judy, we aren't here to pick up litter."

"This ain't litter..." Well that, and Bogo _had_ said that it wouldn't hurt to look. That _is_ why they were here, after all.

"Fine."

Hesitating as they gripped their bullet-guns, Officer Hopps exited the car first. After establishing (for the second time, no less) that _nobody_ was coming, she began walking to the object she'd spotted: A collection of twisted black shapes and even blacker shadows on the sidewalk.

She'd only taken a few steps before she realized what it was, and when she did, she nearly pissed herself.

"Holy shit..." Officer Hopps grabbed her radio. "...T-This is Officer Hopps. I f-found something." She stuttered slightly, almost trembling in fear of what she saw.

"What is it Hopps? Did you find _them?_ " Replied Bogo.

"No...but I found one of their collars...it appears to have been ripped off, _quite violently._ "

"Impossible." Now Bogo was afraid. This wasn't merely some mobster with a key, but a proper _animal_ , a Goliath among Davids, capable of physically _destroying_ their collar.

"This is officer Floyd," Said Bucky, who was using his real name for once. "There is a collar here, and it is _very_ broken."

"Noted. We've dispatched the detectives."

As the investigators poured over it, their concerns only deepened. Considering that a fox-sized Kevlar reinforced strap was rated for over 1000 pounds, the shocker unit, itself programmed to electrocute anyone who pulled at it with more than 40 pounds (fatally so if they exceeded 120), would break well before it did. Indeed, this is exactly what had happened. The collar had been ripped in half, and little bits of plastic and metal were scattered all over the sidewalk.

Bogo would've preferred a mobster with a key. At least they could incinerate the key and incarcerate the mobster. But a _fox_ outright _destroying_ a collar, itself overbuilt to an almost absurd extent?

Considering the shocks it had probably already survived, no electric chair on this Earth would be enough to kill it, and considering how overengineered the collars were, chances were high that they'd have to build a whole new jail to contain _it_.

And in their minds, especially since they did not know who _it_ was, it was a proper _it_ in their minds, a creature ascended from the depths of Hell to terrorize the living, more so than an actual citizen of Zootopia.

Fortunately for the police, the _de facto_ demigod who had done this (although they thought of _it_ as more of a demon), its mind briefly poisoned by anger, had not thought to destroy the serial number stamped onto the plastic casing. This turned out to be a significant lead in the case, for the collars and their serial numbers were both handled by the DEHA, and you could get a name from a number as easily as you could run a plate.

* * *

[ **THIS IS ANOTHER BELLWETHER SEGMENT, AND IT _WILL_ CONTAIN BATSHIT CRAZY NARRATION]**

A scrawny human clad in an old tie dye shirt and black nylon pants sat over 40 years after you at the other end of the table, somehow reading your thoughts on a wrist-mounted Trinitron display that wasn't even plugged in, and transcribing them on a typewriter that had been fashioned from the finest imported cubic zirconium that money could buy. The human wasn't quite 6 feet tall, and, despite going about his day to day life in the late 2010's, wore his wavy hair in a massive approximation of an Afro, along with thick sideburns that would've felt right at home in your time, rather than his. Sideburns metaphorically and literally aside, he'd found himself in quite a pickle.

"Bellwether, I've got ideas for my little story, but, there's a problem." He began.

Youthought it intriguing enough to further interrogate. "Methinks it'zst sufficiently intriguingst enough to furthermore interrogate'd thee on the subject matter," you said. "W'tiz thy problem?"

"Well," the said the human, his typewriter loudly clattering as he took down your every word "-they, as in to say my ideas, failed to satisfy my self-imposed _mindfuck quota_ , so I considered writing them in the 2nd person point of view for added surrealism."

"T'izzit naught agast the regulatory regulated arbitration guidelines?" You asked.

"Well it...um..." Perhaps the human didn't want to admit it.

"P'rhaps t'be moreso prudent to inquirem if maybe you doth not care."

"Are you asking me if I care?" The human, having realized that your statement was not a question, did not give an answer.

"Methinks I suppose'th that thy statement be'est true. Doth thoust care'for such regulatory prohibitions in writing?"

"Not really. I'm just hoping that if the audience doesn't like it, one of them will actually _say_ something about it _before_ they rat me out to the grammar police. Although other writers have certainly gotten away with far more egregious violations, especially when it comes to detailed, explicit sex scenes."

"Thenst you've got it." As much as you enjoyed the human's company, you had other things to do in and below La-La Land, and as much as you loathed his company, he failed to write any of your insults down.

You got up, and walked along the orange brick road to a beat up old Pepsi machine. Upon reaching it, you jammed a few bills into the change slot and crawled through a 20 meter long tunnel to the East German side of the Berlin Wall where a "skateboard" button could be found. You pressed it, and crawled right back, prompting the machine to violently eject a bottle at a nearby wall, the impact ripping a hold in said wall to reveal a PepsiCola branded skateboard.

Several minutes later, you were confidently rolling through the halls of the Cliffside Insane Asylum in your pale green regal cloak, as the affairs and jabberings of La-La Land continued above. As much as you wished to return, you were well aware of some unfinished business down here that needed to be attended to. Business that began with "N" and ended with "URSE RATCHET."

As punishment (for exactly what, you could talk about and hint at for hours, yet neglected to outright declare or even decide), you'd locked her down here, in the deepest, darkest (and as the power had gone out, this was now a quite literal darkness), nastiest part of the asylum...yet now a profound dissonance bit into your mind, as the very sadism that compelled you to leave her in the basement to rot now forced you to venture into that very basement to annoy her with your pestering.

Fortunately, you hadn't ordered the android to make these hallways infinite, so you did _eventually_ reach her cell, still as off-white as it had been when you were confined to it... _oh_ how the tables had turned since those days...

"Helllo Rat-chet!" You cooed, clicking your... _you know what, let's just call them hands_...on the bars to further taunt her, as you concealed your growing frustration at the linguistics nerds who still hadn't given your [hands] a proper name, and the animators that had given you them in the first place.

"You know-" said the android sheep with the nixie tube eyes.

"NOWeth THOU ART MUST've TO LISTEN TO MEstth HERE aqui TO-DAY, I PETITION YOU TO CEASEth THY INTERRUPTIONingS OF MY LECTURES." You were understandably mad, as she had interrupted your evil lecture.

"Sorry." said the android. "I just wanted to inform you that I can fix those [hands] of yours."

"Of what doeseth thou sprach of what you did mention?" Now you were quite curious.

"Name any appendage you can think of, and I can swap one in."

"Methinks is'st've be-ith the will of Dawn Belllwether to wishe to schhedule a meeting(e) with you pertaining to the subject matter of this subject matter at a later date." You said, as you ambled over to an eyeless but otherwise exact duplicate of yourself, who handed you a red phone.

"Helllo, Merlllihn!"

"Uh, what?" Said the one sane man in this entire goddamn building.

"Methinks is'st've be-ith the will of Dawn Belllwether to wishe to schhedule a meeting(e) with Randall pertaining to the subject matter of this subject matter at a later date. Concatenate it to string array labelled 'myUNDERSCOREcalendar'."

"Wait, myUNDERSCOREcalender or my_calendar?"

"The zeroth one"

"...Sure, whatever." (Actually, Dawn Bellwether _was_ on to something here. Arrays in programming are almost always indexed from 0.)

The duplicate self that had handed you the phone just moments ago was now lying on the floor, dead as the doornail you'd murdered earlier today for gas money. Having concluded the call, you hung up by peeling the plastic casing off of the handset as if it were a banana, and shoving the whole thing into the duplicate's mouth and quite a ways down her throat. Having concluded this business, you dismissed the android, and turned your attention back to **_NURSE RATCHET._**

"I hereby dismissith thee so that I may returneth my attention to Nurse Ratchet...art thou readi to playe?" You asked.

"My name...is Swinton!" Speaking of names, Nurse Ratchet continued to persist in her own title-centric delusion.

"Very welle..." you remarked, skating away into the a darkness that your lantern only partly dispelled, as a new door opened in Ratchet's cell. As she stepped through the door (see, you weren't quite sane enough to use the straitjacket on her, so there was nothing stopping the former nurse from getting up), she found herself standing in a spacious room that was painted to look like the surface of a cartoon moon: countless glow in the dark 5-pointed stars plastered onto a dark indigo wall above an equally false painted-on horizon. In the center of the room, the floorboards had been raised up in a circular formation that resembled a crater. A grey security camera swiveled in the corner with an audible whir, dangling from its mount as it panned across the room.

To Ratchet's left, there was a second door, and from this door, a round humanoid with a wide, white, and decidedly _un_ round rectangular prism for a head peeked the aforementioned rectangular prism that was his head 'round the corner, his soulless, bloodshot eyes (which you had painstakingly painted several hours prior) briefly making contact with Ratchet's, before the birthday boy ran off, his classic, pointy hat somehow staying on his head in spite of the utterly inhuman accelerations this guy seemed capable of. Indeed, it was as if he merely teleported from place to place, rather than actually moving, yet despite his odd method of locomotion, Ratchet followed him anyway (or at least, as best as she could), as he swapped the conical paper headpiece for a high-class 19th century monocle and top hat, before entering a rather macabre office that was full of all sorts of random crap, including an empty dentist's chair that was bolted to the semi-gloss linoleum floor before the interface console of an elaborate and slightly nonfunctional CCTV system, a highly detailed map of the state of Utah plastered to a wall, a petite blue cactus in a flowerpot, the gas money you'd stolen from the now dead doornail, and a Winnie the Pooh plushie that had been cut in half, his entrails spilling from his torso in what was surely a very painful fashion.

"Dammit!" Said the birthday boy. "The guard must have run off." And so the strange creature, who's name you had decreed to be "Blam", walked away.

"What sort of game is this?" As Ratchet stood, bewildered, in the room, she noted with steadily growing horror that a fucked up clown with an unhinged jaw and a murderous gleam to its eye was slowly entering the room through a hole in the wall.

And then he was gone, rudely interrupted by the clock, which had just rolled over from 5 AM to HAM in what approximated some sort of absurd visual pun. The credits began to roll, and an almost painful mechanical screech was heard as a large metal door, much like that of an airliner, unsealed behind her. And through this door, Nurse Ratchet saw something that, to her, was even more amazing than Flumpty Bumpty's House of Horrors: A bridge at sunset, crossing over an immense waterfall in the mountains, the silhouetted city of Zootopia visible in the distance.

In other words, she saw the outside world for the first time in a week.

Ratchet was starving, but she ran. Ratchet hadn't slept in three days, yet she ran, desperate to escape Dawn Bellwether's sick games. She'd been beaten, tormented, and even impaled, and from these she fled for the sanity of the outside, looking over her shoulder at the facade of what had once been a normal building, a facade that was now concealing the Lovecraftian evils you had seen fit to unleash inside. The thought of said horrors within only made Nurse Ratchet run faster, right into your tripwire.

"Come on now, you couldn't possibly be thinking about leaving, _you sillybilly!_ The game's not over yet." You said through a mouth from which a trio of octopus tentacles (complete with suction cups) now emerged, as you dragged her in by the ankles using said tentacles, Ratchet kicking and screaming the entire way.

* * *

It was very early in the morning, and soon the sun would rise over the city.

Shortly after Officer Hopps' discovery in the inner city, the collar had been taken to the ZPD station as evidence, a few calls had been made to the Department of the Enforcement of the Harmony Act, and within the hour they'd returned a name and an address for the broken collar's presumed owner.

As of 5:37 AM, Nicholas Wilde was wanted for... _I think it was violation of The Harmony Act? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was it._ Whatever the hell it was they wanted him for, officers Wyndel Konpii, Jacques Clawseau, and...uh... _Greg_ , had been sent to investigate, starting at his apartment.

The door had been cracked open when they had arrived, and as officer Konpii entered the room, the building's CCTV systems experienced what I might call a _very_ curious malfunction, one which destroyed any footage of their entrance into the apartment. Several seconds later, the malfunction had ceased, the door was shut, and the three officers were gone.

As of 10:02 AM, Nicholas Wilde was wanted for 3 counts of what would probably be filed as murder, and at the very least consituted kidnapping.

Except, this isn't _really_ what happened, far from it. All three officers were still technically alive at 10:02, in the sense that if the right person had asked for it, they would've all come back. Of course, they didn't, and now they never will. But what became of them? How did they meet their mysterious fate?

"I don't know." said the human with the typewriter, sitting across from me at Bellwether's table, Bellwether herself fast asleep (because _of course_ he's writing this shit at 2 AM).

"The security cameras might have glitched out, but as the omniscient narrator, I happen to know the truth, and I see no reason to withold the details."

"Then do tell me, will you not? The audience _needs_ to know!"

"Well then let's begin right where the security footage ends, shall we? Actually, no. We'll start shortly before the footage cuts. You know, context and all that jazz."

As I was saying, it was a bit after 6 in the morning, and officer Greg, the smallest of the three, was clutching the arrest warrant in one hand and his walkie-talkie in the other, as if he thought they'd save him from the savage predator they were trying to apprehend. Officers Clawseau and Konpii, meanwhile, were both armed to the teeth with every sort of taser or tranquilizer there was, with Konpii even sporting a pair of bullet guns in jet black holsters on her belt.

 _DING!_ Went the rickety old elevator, every second of its 44 years prominently on display. The momentary _pop_ of Officer Konpii unbuttoning his holster could be heard above the clanking of early 20th century machinery as the doors opened, revealing a hallway lit by naked CFLs installed in fixtures that would've once seemed cozy. Sticking out like a sore thumb was the dark grey security camera installed in the corner, which officer Clawseau interpreted to mean one of two things: The owner of the building was either rich enough to install such a system (good, but unlikely, given the condition of the building), or, there was enough crime going on in and/or near the building to make the installation of such a system necessary (bad).

Considering who they were dealing with, Clawseau assumed the latter. He hated the preds to his core, and how could he not, after what they'd done to his brother? Konpii, a longtime ZPD veteran who'd had to chase down foxes by the hundreds, held a dull but omnipresent disdain for Nicholas' species in particular. Greg, meanwhile, was merely scared of the many creatures that were bigger than him, and he held the certainly atypical but not outright unpopular opinion that it was the mega-fauna, whether pred or prey, who ought to be collared.

They nervously strolled the halls, safe in the knowledge that Nicholas probably was not here, yet terrified in the feeling that he most certainly would be. Although they found the door to be cracked open, the lights off inside the apartment, they knocked anyway.

No answer.

They opened the door, casting a beam of musty, yellowed light into the room of a man who had seen better days. The furniture was old, the radiator by the door was quite rusty in places, the few books on the shelf were faded and dusty, and a small box full of records sat beneath a desk. Across the room, there was what might have been sold as a laundry basket lined with a tattered baby-blue blanket, the whole setup constituting a _very_ stereotypical canine "nest".

As the officers filed into the room, Konpii made the fateful mistake of flipping the light switch. This caused the door to slam shut right as a single ceiling mounted bulb, naked in a fixture that had long ago dry-rotted, activated, trapping them in a room that was now lit in an almost alien blueish-white tone.

Yet Nicholas Wilde was nowhere to be seen. Clawseau, stumbling backwards in his momentary confusion, tripped on the record player and fell against one of the walls, the wall itself doing little to support him as it and the others fell flat on the floor like dominoes. What had once been a room was now merely a strangely painted section of floor within an enormous maze of 20 meter high neon blue linoleum walls and hallways wide enough to count as highways. (And to this end there was even a black '49 Buick roadmaster, as beautiful as it was beat up, idling off in a corner.) The sound of the collapsing apartment resonated with the subtle rumble of Nicholas Wilde's former drug-mobile, and echoed eerily though the immense labyrinth, itself as dark as it was gigantic.

Officer Greg stood there, incoherently stuttering for several seconds before managing to stammer out a " ** _WHAT?!_** "

Not one of them noticed, for they were distracted by the incandescent gleam of the Buick's now activated headlights, but a shadowy figure, his body more confined smoke than flesh, was approaching them from the depths of the maze, the small red lamp on his neck glimmering off of the mostly polished floor. The Buick, meanwhile, was beginning to revv its engine, as its chrome-plated grille re-purposed itself into a rather menacing set of teeth.

The Buick, guided by the unseen strings of the shadow-fox puppeteer, lunged for the cops, clipping officer Clawseau and barely missing Greg and Konpii.

"Tick, tock, goes the clock..."

The Buick pulled an almost supernaturally tight U-turn.

"...Now watch the bullets fly."

The black sedan, headlights glowing like the eyes of a demon, lunged for them again as Kompii fired his gun, its gaping, rusty maw swallowing Officer Greg in a single bite.

"Tick, tock, and all too soon..."

The shadowy fox was now 13 feet tall, the smoke that was his body rolling towards the officers like a screaming fog as the Buick menacingly honked.

Konpii, noting the puppet master vulpine, placed a single shot right through what he figured was its head.

"...you and I _must die!_ "

All of the lights went out, plunging the maze into darkness.

It was now very, _very_ cold in the void.

 _"I don't think any sort of lightbulb can fix this."_

* * *

It was 9 AM on a Sunday, and Julian, his neck once again ensnared by the electric pestilence, was waiting in line at a cafe, every single second ticking by with a growing angst directed at his collar. It would be a small miracle if he put up with it long enough to get his coffee and sneak back the nearest mostly abandoned industrial zone, where he could consume it, barenecked and in peace.

As he festered in line, the growing, glowing darkness within looming over him like the blade of a guillotine, he began to zone out as his thoughts turned elsewhere. He was almost daydreaming now, seeing alleyways and doors in his mind's eye as he peeked through keyholes and snuck through mailslots, air vents, and even the intake manifold of an idling sedan, scanning building after building, sometimes from within, sometimes from without, until he found himself back on the street, face to face with Officer Hopps, who apparently never sleeps.

Yet even in broad daylight, she did not notice his mind's eye hovering over her, and proceeded with her task. After all, even with a savage chomper on the loose, Judy had a quota to fulfill.

Officer Hopps, who currently stood aside a row of parked cars, was looking around, checking for passers-by. Julian knew this look: It was the sort of look one used shortly before committing a crime, the look one used to see if any cops were nearby, and Nicholas, unlike Judy, who evidently wasn't all that experienced with it yet, had used it countless times. Satisfied that nobody was watching, Officer Hopps approached a slightly beat-up parking meter, a Paris Green panel that read "paid" on display and clearly visible from Julian's out-of-body vantage point. She summoned a strange sort of key from her pocket, and jammed it into a tiny hole in the parking meter's casing.

The machine beeped, and a red "expired" was now prominently displayed. Putting the key away, Judy stepped back, pretended to idly twiddle her fingers and look around, before retrieving her ringer and punching in a fee onto a ticket, which she stashed under the wiper blade of the victim's car. Here she was: Officer Judy Hopps, valedictorian at the police academy and _the first_ bunny cop, fraudulently ticketing the very people she was supposed to be protecting.

She had a quota to fulfill, after all.

Perhaps Engels was on to something when he said that class exploitation and civilization were one and the same...At any rate, Julian was practically seeing red. _That smug little buck-toothed bitch! When we get our claws on that piece of shit cop, I'll-_

"Sir?" The giraffe barista interrupted his thought, dragging him from the happenings of elsewhere back to the cafe just in time to stop his collar from going red. As for Julian, he was now at the front of the line.

"Are you going to order?

"Um, can I get a-"

"HEY!-" A little old badger lady with a collar gone orange was standing in one of the booths, a skunk in a grey hoodie with a pink purse beneath his arm bolting through the doors and onto the street. "He stole my purse!"

Julian, who was still in an indignant mood, forgot about getting coffee and dashed out the door after the thief, rounding the corner just as the skunk ran past Officer Hopps, who was far too busy running a parking ticket racket to actually fight crime.

So Julian gave chase.

A cheap looking sedan, driven by another hooded scumbag who was evidently the skunk's partner in crime, suddenly appeared out of an alley, the skunk vanishing within in the blink of an eye as the car sped off with a very inconspicuous squeal of tires on asphalt.

Undaunted, Julian ran on after them. Once upon a day in the late 1950's, he'd found an old comic book in an alley, and had pretended to be a superhero of some sort with his friends for a whole goddamn week. Of course, he was more of a vigilante now, but this fact did nothing to dampen the adrenaline rush as Julian weaved between pedestrians, internally debating whether or not to blitz into the street at a lightning pace.

His collar did not approve of the wannabe superhero antics, and sent him tumbling to the ground with a bolt of white-hot pain running down his spine, and just as he was starting to catch up to the getaway vehicle.

 _Damn!_

Everyone had seen the fall.

But all he could see was a no-good thieving piece of shit who was getting away, and a bulky, uncomfortable, electric leash that was getting in the way. His hand rose to his neck, and they watched. Julian clenched the Kevlar demon in his fist and pulled, the crowd now screaming and running for their lives (although there were a few preds, including an ocelot with an affinity for graffiti, who would've gladly stayed to watch, and were only _pretending_ to run for their own sake).

To Julian, it might as well have been fanfare at the races, and now he was back in the game, his mind surging with the joy of liberation and a sense of indignation that throbbed and writhed on the floor, screaming for help, not at all unlike an emotionally unstable pred kid after his taming party. Only this time, he wouldn't...no, _couldn't_ , ignore its cries for justice.

Or maybe it was _revenge_ that he sought. Either way, he wasn't about to quit.

Officer Hopps, meanwhile, had paid little attention to the fox that darted past her. Whether or not all foxes looked exactly the same to her, this one was wearing a collar, and clearly couldn't be the one she was looking for.

Then she heard the screaming.

Then she saw him, standing in a sunbeam with a black thing in an outstretched fist.

He and his mangled collar fell to the ground almost simultaneously, the fox on all fours in a runner's crouch for but a moment before flying away across the concrete in the blink of an eye.

"This is officer Hopps, I found the _savage!_ "

Julian was once again up to speed, but it just wasn't enough. The sedan was well over a block and a half away, and it was only getting further. A strange feeling welled up within him, the sort Nicholas had often felt on the highway: It was the convulsion, the urge to _floor it!_ The pedal, so to speak, went to the metal, and Julian could hear his own flesh revving and roaring as he darted into the street and charged forth, finally gaining on the sedan.

"Well well well, look who's doing _80!_ " Said Randall. Even in the metric system, 80 was pretty fast for a barefooted fox. "You're starting to figure it out, aren't you?"

"Figure out what?"

" _Your set_. It's all in the mind, you know."

Then they heard the sirens.

"Oh shit!" Said the skunk. "We got company!"

"Come and get me, coppers!" Exclaimed Julian, who was far too indignant to care.

"Then we'll just have to ditch 'em." Said the driver.

The sedan hooked a left and plunged into a tunnel.

"Think you can hide in the rainforests?" Mused Officer Hopps, who had ditched the jokemobile for a conveniently placed ZPD cruiser (because why _wouldn't_ there be one right there?), and generally had a penchant for thinking aloud. "We'll see about that!"

"Come, Julian, our game is afoot!" Said Randall, who was giggling now in the most appropriately inappropriate of fashions. His amusement was not shared by Julian, who more than anything simply wanted to retrieve the old lady's purse.

Julian and Randall dashed into the tunnel to the rainforests several seconds behind the skunks, Officers Hopps and Bucky several seconds behind them.

The distant chorus of gunfire patter echoed through the tunnel and into the earholes of a punk-ass teenaged reptilian overload who was cloaked by a spell of _ignoramus opticus_ and was at the moment taking the face of Deborah Wilker. The creature, noting the cops, had suddenly found itself seated next to a comatose crackhead, ravenously finishing a pawpsicle and generally pretending to be innocent. The cold-blooded lizard-man was notably relieved (although he didn't actually allow anyone to notice) that the cops were not interested whatsoever in either him or the crackhead, and had passed them by in their chase. As for the bullets, both of them (which had actually been fired at Julian) were ricocheting through the tunnel, the second one shattering the rear window of the sedan.

" _HOLY SHIT! FLOOR IT!_ "

And so the thieves, Julian, and the cop cars thundered out of the tunnel just as they had thundered in.

"Excellent" said the reptilian overlord. "It's all going as planned..." After several seconds, he stabbed the crackhead in the heart with the pawpsicle stick, took his wallet, and ran, laughing all the way to the actual bank where he invested the money in stocks.

The skunks in their sedan, meanwhile, had just emerged from the tunnel and had hooked an immediate left down a rather steep ramp. Julian, on foot on the now wet asphalt, cartoonishly skidded round the corner on one foot before charging after them. Down the road it went as it dived into the simulated jungle of the rainforest district and launched back up into the canopy.

"Dude!" Said the skunk, who was not quite weightless at the moment (inertial reference frames and hills and all) "Slow down!"

"With 'dos cops on our tails? _Hell_ to the _no!_ " Retorted the driver, who was now guiding the car down a clockwise-spiraling road. Julian, who was barely 3 seconds behind them at this point, leapt off of the road and landed on the roof of the car right as it drove through a very low hanging piece of foliage.

"Did you hear that?!"

His feet were delightfully sore from the run, his hands were weeping with jubilation at the impact, and his entire face, eyes included, burned from the countless leaves he'd just been rammed through, and all the sap they'd left behind. In other words, Julian West felt properly _alive_.

The car pulled into a relatively obscure alley to hide, both occupants ready to make a mad dash for the trees as they frantically opened the doors, Julian himself having already leapt off to confront them.

"That purse doesn't belong to you. _Give it back._ " Commanded Julian, who'd left no time for them to be surprised. The two mammals collectively took one good look at the indignant, barenecked fox that stood before them now, and lost what little cool they had left. Releasing the purse in what amounted to more of a throw than simply letting go, the Skunk bolted first, followed by his friend shortly thereafter.

Julian, in stark contrast to the frantic chase he'd just concluded, slowly strolled to the dropped purse, taking his time to ensure that nothing had been scattered across the jungle floor, even as the police sirens got louder and louder. Having concluded his task, he entered the nearest building through an old backdoor, and was so hyperfocused on returning the purse that he didn't even notice the impossibly short trip back to the cafe.

As far as the cops were concerned, he'd vanished. Yet here he was, returning the purse as the aforementioned artistically inclined ocelot watched with growing fascination. _Who is this guy?_ He thought as Julian West exited the cafe and made for who knows where else.

* * *

It was 11 o' clock, and Julian had taken his sweet time in returning to Honey's townhouse. Honey herself was worried sick, and for fairly good reason: A news report about Nicholas Wilde was now prominently displayed on the idiot box.

"Where have you been? They're looking _everywhere_ for you!"

"He shouldn't even be here!" Quipped Cyrus.

"No, Honey. They're looking for _Nicholas Wilde_." Said Julian.

"...And you're someone else now?"

Julian sighed as he took a good look at himself in his mind's eye.

"No, I don't think so. _Not anymore._ "

"In other news-" blared the TV "-a local church has been defaced with a very tasteless piece of graffiti-"

* * *

Author's note: If Stephen King can make a fictional version of himself a character in his own stories, than so too can I. Also, One Night at Flumpty's and its sequel are arguably the best FNAF fan games ever made, and a certain translation of Plato's _The Republic_ features Socrates using "sillybilly" as an insult. It was just too funny to pass up, so I used it here.

Credit to /u/WildeHopps, /u/jodyjm13, and /u/iamcave76 for the names of the cops. Lastly, according to Wikipedia, the spiral compact fluorescent lamp was invented in 1976, but the costs of retooling a factory to manufacture them were prohibitively expensive, so they were shelved.

Reviews are appreciated, thanks for reading!


	8. Disappear Here

YAY! It's summer! Also, I'm back with the next chapter of this surreal clusterfuck of a story...

Hey, remember when I said this story would get awfully blasphemous in one of the early chapters? Well, Julian has yet to be outright _worshiped_ , but we're getting there. This chapter also contains depictions of child abuse that could be triggering for some readers.

* * *

10:59 AM, November 18th, 1973. Sunday:

The grotesquely mutilated corpse of a barenecked fox sat on the concrete, its blood staining the sidewalk like some sort of demented watercolor.

"This is officer Floyd. I've found Nicholas Wilde...or whatever's left of 'em."

* * *

"Here's today's script." Said Merlllihn, who was adjusting the mic. After venting her frustrations on the matter for the 3rd time, the sheep with the nixie tube eyes had begun to proactively fuck around with Merllihn's brain chemistry in such a way as to render him physiologically incapable of sleep. He'd been up for nearly 40 hours now, and hardly looked worse for wear as he handed me the script. I skimmed through the pages, as a look of growing disappointment graced my face.

"Whatever happened to the mindfuck quota?" I said.

"See-" explained the teenager with the wrist-mounted trinitron, "I _did_ that already, and now it's time to _do_ something else...To tell a different sort of tale. There's more than one way to do surrealism, you know."

As he said this, a sentient cluster of neon-colored foam pool noodles that bore a striking resemblance to the flying spaghetti monster rolled over to a nearby picnic table and abducted Merlllihn.

"Like what?"

"Well for starters: Julian took his sweet, sweet time coming home after last chapter's chase. I don't know about _you_ , Mr. 3rd Person Omniscient Narrator, but _I_ for one would like to see what he was up to."

"So, this might be our last appearance?"

"At least until Bellwether makes herself relevant again. And don't worry, she will."

"...So," I asked, if only to pass the time. "What ever _did_ Julian get up to while he was gone?"

* * *

It was not even 9:37 AM on that very same Sunday which had begun with a full blown car chase, the remnants of the adrenaline high still wearing off as Julian sat atop a metal beam, the beam itself bolted to a lattice tower that rose many meters above a part of town that wasn't all that good, yet also wasn't quite bad enough to give HappyTown a run for its money. Several meters in front of him was one of the innumerable power lines that snaked through the city and angrily buzzed at anybody who dared to get too close. By this point, Julian had been sitting here for so long that the cable had given up buzzing, growling, or even hissing, and was now verbally imploring him to leave with the sort of accent that one would expect from a tough-as-nails inner city union rep.

"Hey you, fuck off!"

Not that Julian noticed. His mind, you see, was elsewhere (literally and metaphorically), re-living his frantic spat of vigilante justice with equal parts admiration and horror. The black pestilence had already put him in a sour mood, and seeing the little old lady getting robbed had somehow... _snapped_...something in him. In that moment, at one with himself, he'd stopped caring about all other things, and for a few glorious minutes he was first, foremost, and only concerned with returning the suitcase, and hadn't really realized what he'd been doing in order to get to it, as if his powers were more so a function of his subconscious mind than of his waking ego (in the Freudian sense of the term).

"That's not a bad way to put it, actually." Said Randall, who, despite having joined Julian up here on the tower, was speaking to nobody in particular whilst ignoring the complaints of the power lines.

But what disturbed him Julian most about the chase were the screams. The whole goddamn city was looking for him now, and his notoriety was spreading. Soon there'd be nowhere to hide, and nobody left who would neither hound him for an autograph nor turn him in to the ZPD.

"Sometimes I wish I could just disappear."

The silence of the oncoming void struck him square in the face and sent his head rolling like a goddamn golf ball (much like the speeding freight train from chapter 3). An endless darkness now filled Julian's field of view, punctuated only by a distant idling Buick Roadmaster that was just as black as the rest of this void, yet still clearly there and visible in a sense...

"No, not like that-" he said as he put his head back on by proprioception alone, giving it a few good turns to tighten the screws. Having quite literally replaced his head, Julian climbed into the nostalgic recollections of a once familiar car, his mind cloaked by a hazy shroud of muscle memory. "I just don't want to be seen so much."

He was still in the car, both now completely transparent from an observer's perspective and floating next to the lattice tower, nearby photons charging like bulls as they were plucked from reality itself and re-inserted on the other side of the car, free to continue their journey as if there were no car to begin with. Julian's sight momentarily went all fuzzy as external sensor data began to feed into his optic nerves (redirecting the photons, after all, meant that none were present to strike Julian's retinas, ironically rendering him as blind as he was invisible). Somewhere in the 5th dimension, a pair of RCA cables were plugged into his eyeballs, and busied themselves chaining together organic molecules and inserting them into the microscopic registers between the neurons in Julian's eyes, which his brain eventually interpreted as a visual panorama.

Julian, despite not really knowing how exactly he knew, nevertheless _knew_ of his current invisibility (more 5th dimensional tomfuckery). Perhaps Randall really was starting to get inside his head, or maybe it was a case of what his superstitious old grandma had called "intuition".

"Well no, not like this either...I just don't want to be..." Julian was not sure what he wanted, and, as was the case with most computers, he realized he'd have to be _painfully_ specific with Randall. At least he wasn't a genie, perverting one's commands to net the exact opposite result.

A soft tingle worked through his brain, and Randall spoke up. "Methinks the word you're looking for is _"noticed"_. Correct?"

"Yeah, I guess so. It's really funny, actually: Ask any of Them, and they will tell you that we're sneaky, yet us foxes can never just _blend_ in to a crowd. Well, _They_ never let us, anyway."

"Well I don't know about _that_ , whether or not your impersonal _'they'_ is a proper noun." Said Randall, as if he knew something that he wasn't quite letting on.

"There are _a lot_ of things you don't know, Randall. Now what I'd like to know is how a fox like myself can slip into the crowd without being noticed."

"Well that's _easy!_ Just quit being a fox."

Julian, who was still invisible, chuckled as he gazed upon the white halo that was his own form, not quite seeing himself as Randall saw him. This chuckling, hastened by a lifetime of manic self-loathing and countless prayers wishing for _exactly_ what Randall was now implicitly offering, collapsed into hysterical laughter. "You can't just _quit_ being a fox! That's not how it works...that's not how _any_ of this shit works!" He said as he theatrically gestured towards the city that was as utterly invisible from his perspective as he was from it. "If I could just snap my fingers and quit being _this_ -" He said as he gestured to himself in what was becoming a rant "-if I could just wish upon a star and be an oryx or something, I would've done it years ago!"

Approximately 26,000 light years away, a few bits in a program counter flipped. This caused the execution to jump to a function call that loaded new data from one of the many xenobiology modules into the RAM banks of a small army of Turing machines, the machines themselves squirreling back and forth at near lightspeed on their extradimensional tapes as they gave orders to the grey polygons and took note of the incoming data by the petabytes.

Dozens of miles away (from the car, not from Sagittarius A*), a librarian was placing an old medical textbook back on a shelf when it, and many of the other printed volumes on said shelf, all jiggled at once, as if each and every single one of them had been opened, read, copied, annotated, compared, and then closed in the 5th dimension.

Come to think of it, that's _exactly_ what had just happened.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, mammals were scanned, histograms were plotted, averages were deduced, and curves were fiddled with, the resulting conceptual instructions feeding back into a network of nested compilers that churned away at the problem until at last a string of machine instructions numbering in the exabytes was fed back into the hardware controllers, which tossed exactly 161.71268384779945487429049972218232 kilograms of singularity into the void-incinerator, redirecting the now liberated mass-energy into the forges, wherein chains of atoms were pulled from the void and sent to the grey polygon arms of the Lovecraftian machine that was Randall, sticking, unsticking and generally modifying them piece by piece until the completed body of an oryx sat on the beam (the Buick now nowhere to be seen, having been warped back into its garage in a plane that resembled purgatory).

Julian's rant had been thoroughly interrupted in less than a nanosecond.

"Actually, Julian, you have a set. So yes, that's _exactly_ it works." Replied Randall in a slightly sarcastic tone.

Julian, who was somewhat surprised by suddenly finding himself in the body of an oryx ( _exactly_ as he had implicitly requested, no less), lost his balance and fell from the lattice tower, his twisted horns catching on another beam and violently whipping his now elongated head to the side, breaking his neck in two places and and sending all ~400 pounds of what was now Julian the oryx plummeting face first into the solid concrete below. His snout (and what a very long face it now was) collapsed like an accordion as what remained of his neck vertebrae shattered into splinters like a cluster of frag grenades, his elbows and shoulders dislocating shortly thereafter as his ribcage collapsed and rebounded like the slinky that Nick had once played with as kid. Several clock cycles later, more bits had been flipped, and the data crunching resumed, shuffling atoms by the trillions as this latest of Julian's puppets was reconstructed and stood back up in seconds, although it didn't take him long for him to fall a second time as his stilty, unfamiliar legs to give out from under him. After several more tries, which all ended in a similar manner, he managed to stand, placing his left hand (which was now a hoof) on the base of the lattice tower to stabilize himself as he fumbled with a napkin in his right, fighting a rather poignant wave of vertigo and a minor nosebleed.

Fortunately for Julian, both issues passed, and 3 minutes later, he found himself slowly ambling around the small clearing in which the tower had been constructed, his strides awkward and sporadic yet sufficient to keep all 6 feet of him from falling over as he took in the sights and smells of this city through the flesh of someone who was so _very_ else indeed that it was downright unimaginable to the mind of a canid. Randall, ever the copycat, had apparently undergone a similar transformation, the familiar robot fox replaced with a barrel-chested cervine form that, both of his nixie-tube eyes now prominently displaying the numeral "65536".

"Awfully _twit-chy_ , isn't it?" Remarked the android cervine as he leapt from one hoof to another in what barely seemed an instant. Julian, to a limited degree of success, found himself imitating the antics of his...

 _Are we actually friends now?_ He wondered. Indeed, this too was one of the many things Julian did not know. On one hand, they cracked jokes and spun tall tales (all too literally, in the case of Jeremy Fischer) while wagging tails, yet Julian could not recall any other sort of "friend" of his who resorted to electrostimulating his prostate in the shower.

"To be fair, Julian, I am 99.9% sure _that_ was a miscommunication (plus or minus a floating point rounding error)."

"Just keep your hands off my dick, OK?"

"Julian, I've already had to reconstruct that _glorious baculum_ of yours (and just about everything else for that matter) twice already."

"What, are you saying I-" And then Julian realized that, as a matter of fact, he _had_ actually died multiple times over the last few days.

"OK, well aside from that, _hands off!_ " And then, having barked off his orders concerning his dick, he thought to actually check for the damn thing, and was briefly horrified in an emasculatory sense when he failed to see it. However, as is the case with most mammals in the city, it was merely concealed by a sheath and a pair of khakis, and Julian recalled this fact less than a second later. What really stuck him, however, was the comic enormity of this body's testicles, which prompted a giggle of disbelief. "How the hell do they even walk around with these things?" He said, in awe as much as in horror.

"Like this!" Joked Randall, who was now waddling like an old-timey cartoon character, his now noodly legs doing splits at the hips with downward facing right angles for knees as he crabwalked around with his feet over 10 feet apart.

For once, Julian found Randall's attempt at humor funny, if only because in comparison to all the other wacky shit that had already gone down around Randall, strolling about like the guy from _Going to Store_ was only somewhat weird.

"Seriously though-" Julian said as he stopped laughing and took another peek down his pants which was so long that it bordered on homoerotic preydophilia. "-what _else_ did you change?"

"Well for one thing, this species lacks what you canines affectionately call a 'knot'."

Julian's face did not know whether to be confused or horrified, and just gave up after erratically twitching for several seconds.

"How the hell does _that_ work?" Asked Julian, his gears churning as he attempted to work out the logistics of cervine sex. Getting around the spidery legs and the immense antlers would be hard enough on its own, but without a tie, what was to prevent them from drifting apart like an untethered astronauts?

"I mean, you could always try to procure _another_ pornographic Betamax tape." Said Randall, as said pornographic Betamax tape, this one marked _"Plan 69 From Outer Space"_ , materialized in his left hand.

And then Julian remembered the red light district. He'd walked past that place quite a few times over the years, and had _always_ wanted to take a look inside any one of the buildings there (perhaps even the gay bars), although his collar, and his being a fox and all, had always gotten in the way...

 _Until now!_ He thought to himself as a _very_ naughty grin cleaved his conical head in two.

And Julian was right: For now there was neither the collar itself, nor the omnipresent expectation to be wearing one. Well, he was also missing his knot, but he'd have to cross that bridge when he got there, and hopefully that would be very soon, for now he was someone else, no, some _thing_ else altogether. This _other_ , this _impostor_ , was free to waltz into any strip club he wanted, and _nobody_ would be the wiser.

And so he strutted off, his newfound chin (which was somehow even pointier than his old one, and that's saying something) head held high as he stubbed his hoof, stumbled, and fell over yet again in the city that did not fear this other form in the slightest.

"Perhaps a driver update is in order?" Said Randall, a matte, light grey 5-inch floppy disk replacing the porno tape in his hand. Unfortunately, Randall's attempt at communication did not merely fly over Julian's head, but also sailed right past his long, twisting horns.

Then again, considering that he was currently lying on his stomach, this wasn't exactly saying much.

Perhaps if Julian had been a child of the 21st century, plugged into a computer from his first day on this Earth, he would've known what a hardware driver was, or why he'd be interested in an update. No, actually, come to think of it, if Julian were a child of the 21st century, he and the computer would both probably be a pile of radioactive dust by now, or perhaps a sooty silhouette burned onto the nearest wall, assuming he got lucky enough to even be near such a wall when the bomb inevitably went off in one of the lucky few timelines that made it to the 21st century, no less. As it stood in the early 1970's, Julian's experience with computers was little more than the sum total of Honey's numerous rants on the subject (her job was stressful to say the least), and his odds of living to see the year 2001 were slim. Or at least they had been, until he'd met Randall.

"A _what_ update?"

"You're not yet used to this flesh, Julian. I can help with that."

"I'd rather not. The novelty is fun." Said Julian as he pulled himself back up by the bootstraps (not in a capitalist sense, mind you).

"Suit yourself."

And for a while, it seemed like Julian was right. His gait was still somewhat awkward and stilted, but he'd kept himself upright even as he swung himself 'round the corner as he made for the red light district (and how wonderful it was simply to be tall enough to properly swing around a corner at all!). And as he continued his walk, his amazement only increased: He was no longer a part of the crowd, but a spy, or perhaps an aviator, peering down into the city from the peak of a very tall obelisk.

At this moment, Julian wondered what it'd be like to be a giraffe. Indeed, Julian's awe at the sheer strangeness of it all was almost enough to drown out his sexual urges. _Almost._

Yet horny or otherwise, he could hardly ignore the masses ignoring him, tourists with their faces glued to maps, street vendors selling snacks, and a pair of locals theatrically gesturing to each other as they exchanged the latest gossip on Deborah Wilker and walked right past him, as if he were a perfectly ordinary citizen of Zootopia, and not a ticking time bomb who would eat them all if they so much as looked at him wrong. Compared to a lifetime of overt paranoia, their ignorance really was his bliss.

Or at least it _would_ have been his bliss, until it was atomized by a shrill, whiny, and regrettably too familiar voice that bubbled up from the depths of the vast expanses beneath Julian.

"WATCH WHERE YOU'RE STEPPING, ASSHOLE!"

It was one of the gerbil douchenozzles, who, to be fair, had been a bit too close to where Julian's hoof had come down for comfort. Although considering that this was the same asshole who'd made a hobby of running over his tail, he probably deserved it (oh how happy Julian was, now that his tail hung 3 feet in the air and was finally safe from such assaults).

"Why don't _you_ watch where you drive, _dickweed_." Julian did not want to get this new face of his in trouble, so he restrained himself from drop-kicking the piece of shit rodent halfway across the city, and settled for a cryptic remark and a death-glare. But, as per his aforementioned smugness at his newfound physiological counter strategy to the dickweeds and their pipsqueak car, Julian soon forgot about them, and found himself approaching a small crowd of people waiting at a crosswalk, the street sign no longer so far above as before. Try as he might, he had some difficulty recounting the last time he'd had this much fun on a walk, indeed, trapped within and often beneath the inner city crowds, the whole place had felt like a claustrophobic hellhole, from which he had quite literally ascended to some sort of heavenly vantage point.

"WALK" flashed the traffic signal, as the mob continued their collective trip to wherever the hell it was that they were going. And with the grace of a 5 year old autistic kid who was eager to see the world yet hardly knew how to walk like a normal person, so too was Julian. A few of the others merely assumed he was tipsy, and everyone else didn't notice or care. Just this _one_ time, nobody cared.

And then he saw what he still thought of as himself, the WANTED posters bearing an old mugshot of Nicholas Wilde (the fox) plastered all over a wall.

"PUBLIC ENEMY #1" blared the signs, "SAVAGE PREDATOR, EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. DO _NOT_ ENGAGE."

Julian gently removed one of the flyers, a sigh interrupted by a surprised remark. "Wow, I look like _shit_ in this photo."

Julian shoved the poster into one of his pockets, and finally arrived at the gentleman's club. Upon descending the stairs into the basement and throwing open the doors, it took him the entirety of 5 seconds to realize just how right Randall had been when he'd suggested a driver update: Julian may have been controlling the flesh of an oryx, but his was still the mind of a fox, with sexual preferences to match. The twisted, twitchy, spidery, oscillating forms he gazed upon within the room were clearly _trying_ to be sexy (although none of the strippers were outright naked, they all had a very severe case of camel toe), yet Julian, who was firmly in denial of being even _remotely_ into interspecies _anything_ , deluded himself into perceived them in the same way that a 5 year old perceives a boy kissing a girl in a movie: _EWW!_

Julian ran away, screaming, cringing, and generally trying to unsee what he had just gone to great lengths to see. Forget about sex: what Julian _desperately_ needed now was a drink. He caught a hold of himself, quit screaming, and hooked a right into one of Zootopia's many bars, this particular watering hole having the unique distinction of having been a speakeasy back in the 20's. And as a former speakeasy, it had a clandestine yet luxurious atmosphere, the faint aftertaste of cigar smoke and high proof moonshine looming in the background behind the nigh overwhelming fumes of recently laundered cash and the playing cards that redistributed it on a whim. It wasn't long before Julian had gotten himself a drink (a decidedly non-virgin piña colada of all things) and sat his ass down at poker table of questionable legality, where, to his horror, Jeremy Fischer was somehow involved in a game of high stakes poker with only a cheap sheep mask for a disguise, leaving his long (and previously fictional) canine tail, bright orange fur, and bare neck plainly visible for _everyone_ to see and for _nobody_ to notice. _Cheeky little bastard._ Jeremy was, at the moment, in conversation with the shapeshifting reptilian overlord who was pretending to be a painfully oblivious pig, Jeremy hamming it up with some ad-libbed bullshit story about fucking Deborah Wilker while the overlord secretly reloaded the concealed card dispensers which were quite literally holding aces up his sleeves. I mean, Jeremy _was_ the exact kind of guy who _would_ have already fucked Wilker in the broom closet of Jerry Twoshoes' mansion after a long night of hustling cocaine for Dawn Bellwether (in spite of having existed for only one goddamn day so far), but you and I _both_ know that his story was still complete bullshit.

Julian (still in the body of an oryx) took one look at the increasingly absurd scene unfolding in front of him, and gave up. Whether or not getting that piña colada meant that he had to partake in a game of cards with a literal figment of his own imagination, he _really_ needed that drink.

" _Fuck it._ Deal me in."

Julian took a sip of his piña colada. A perfectly mundane thing to do, except oryxes and foxes, owing to their utterly diametric diets, had evolved completely different arrays of taste buds, themselves sensitive to dissimilar sets of organic molecules and flavors. In short, Julian had never tasted such a beverage _as a prey_ , and this, like most of his experiences thus far, was a stone's throw away from totally alien to him, and he soon found himself more concerned with the drink than with the cards.

* * *

It was sometime early in the morning, the sun had yet to rise over the city that frankly loathed its presence outright, and Officer Hopps was rolling into the ZPD station, the servomotors in her forearm lethargically whining as she let go of the door handle and slowly returned her fingers to a neutral posture. The telltale sign of dropping voltage, Officer Gordon could tell by sound that his coworker needed a battery change, and this conviction was only reinforced when he looked up and saw that the usually vibrant amber glow of Judy's eyes had faded, accompanied by a fresh bullethole in her left arm. Officer Hopps hooked a left and entered the stairwell, descending into the boiler room where her spare parts were kept.

"My god Judy, you need an overhaul." Said Bogo, his eyes coming upon the bullethole.

"NEGATIVE. WILDE MUST BE CONTAINED." Chief Bogo had always been in awe of Judy's stubborn attitude, her iron will refusing to break even after nearly 40 hours of continuous operation. But no matter how hard she or anybody else tried, nobody could break the laws of thermodynamics and get away with it.

Bogo inserted the silver key into a hole on the side of her neck, plunging the room into silence as Judy's lights went out completely. A quartet of technicians descended on the corpse of the inexhaustible machine like hawks, and within the minute they'd gotten her damaged arm off. Perhaps later, they'd fix it, but for now, she was needed elsewhere. Meanwhile, an intern was wheeling a cart full of dull black boxes into the room, one of the technicians frantically removing similar ones from Officer Hopps' chest cavity like a savage fox gutting a corpse, as yet another slotted the new cells into place, reconnecting the power leads as she did so. Before long, the spare arm was in place, her interal ammo canisters once again full as the technicians left.

The dead machine almost looked peaceful, reclined on the table as if she were asleep. Or recently deceased.

 _Now is no time for rest..._

Chief Bogo undid a latch and slid a 5 inch floppy disk labelled "orders" into a narrow slot at her waist, closing the latch and twisting the key as if he were starting a car.

Judy's eyes briefly flashed, and suddenly the room was filled with the melancholic sound of the head of her floppy drive scurrying to and fro as it loaded the orders into her memory. Then, for but a moment, Officer Hopps was once again silent, before the machine on the table auto-resurrected in an instant, her eyes now glowing like the headlights of a car.

"You have your orders, Hopps. Get to it."

"WILDE WILL BE FOUND." Said Officer Hopps, her servos whirring as she inspected and subsequently holstered her Magnum, before getting up and speedwalking back up the stairs.

* * *

The 11th of November, 1973:

Pastor Phillip sat in his chair as the kids filed into his room, almost like robots. At the tail end of the line was a young cheetah by the name of Blaine.

As of Friday, Blaine was now 6 years old.

As of Friday, Blaine had to wear a collar. The shocker unit clung to his neck like a tumor, its hideous indicator light drawing everyone's eyes away from his now utterly miserable face. As far as they prey were concerned, he was now a monster to be feared, case closed. As far as the other preds were concerned, his childhood was officially over. No more fun, no more games. Just a few decades of misery and an eternity of hellfire after that. He was, after all, a stain upon the world, a travesty committed against the innocent prey of the city, and he _deserved_ every ounce of The Lord's wrath.

 _Great. There goes the next hour_. Pastor Phillip hated it when one of his students got collared, because now that would be all that anybody wanted to talk about.

"So..." began the pastor. "...how was everyone's week?"

Phillip's classroom was rather suboptimal for Sunday school, long and somewhat narrow rather than broad and square. As a result, a borderline self-evident hierarchy tended to emerge in the classroom, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, all the pred kids were sitting at the back.

A 7 year old rabbit girl made a a face of what passed as deep contemplation when one was 7, as if she were about to say something. Instead, Blaine piped up from the depths of the far end of the room.

"It hurts! It hurts so much! I _hate_ this-"

Blaine never got to finish his sentence before the righteous electric judgement of God forced him to the floor with a _THWACK!_ He couldn't have been silenced more definitively if Randall himself had welded his lips shut with the snap of whatever the hell Randall uses to emulate the functionality of fingers. 5th dimensional syringes?

"Well, I'm sorry-" Pastor Phillip was sorry, alright: _sorry that this little shit was ruining today's lesson!_ "-but you cheetahs _have_ to wear it."

Blaine was sprawled on the floor and sobbing hysterically, and could barely force himself to speak. "Why?"

"Take a good look, class. See how insidious the devil's trickery can be? It's almost cute...makes you almost feel sorry for 'em...makes you drop your guard...But beware, _it's a ruse!_ "

The pastor turned to face Blaine, who was still sobbing.

"Cute he may seem now, but he is the spawn of Satan, and if you let him I assure you he that will drag each and every last one of you straight to Hell! However, doctors do not come for the healthy, they come for the sick. And so we are obliged to direct even _this_ hopeless, depraved _reprobate_ here on the path to Christ-"

For good measure, Pastor Phillip added yet another _THWACK_ , this time from the swing of his ruler, prompting more righteous electric judgement from God's holy black box.

"-And just as The Lord put the thorn in the flesh of Paul to keep him humble, so too has he mandated this thorn to keep them in line. Do not forget, class, that even the sons of the devil can attain salvation-"

More righteous judgement. More beatings with the ruler. More tears.

"-no matter how much we _sinners_ may think otherwise."

* * *

Shortly before 10:00 AM.

"So it hadn't even been 8 hours since I started this stupid job, and already I've got some ZPD coke-sniffer-dog so hot on my ass that he was practically sodomizing me with that nose of his-"

"Wait-" Interrupted Julian. "They have _canine_ ZPD officers?"

"YOUR STORY IS FALSE. **BEEP**."

All were startled by officer Hopps as she rolled up to the table, her eyes glowing bright enough to count as mood lighting in this literally shady establishment.

"What do _you_ know, _tin can_?" Jeremy taunted.

"WE KEEP THE K9'S MUZZLED AND ON LEASH AT ALL TIMES." Answered the robotic officer.

Julian found himself cringing at this remark. Still, even _that_ demeaning line of work would be better than his old job. _God_ he hated that beaver...

* * *

One week later, Pastor Phillip was preparing for another long day preaching at the pulpit, teaching in Sunday School, beating some chomper kid to within an inch of their life, or otherwise proselytizing to anyone who would listen for the next 7 hours. Of course, he was a _decent_ mammal, and it _was_ the weekend, so even his earliest Sunday School lessons only began at around 10:15 or so.

Paster Phillip hadn't even gotten into the church before his morning had gotten sidetracked: Some non-literal jackass by the name of _Banksy_ had defaced his building.

"Crazy _fekin'_ protestant bastards!" Said Father O'Malley O'Connel O'Carrol O'Reilly O'Brian O'Donnell O'Sullivan (who is also Italian) as he gawked in pure schadenfreude at the graffiti that graced Phillip's church with its very presence.

Pastor Phillip's church was just had another worn down brick building that wasn't nearly as spectacular as the _proper_ cathedral that Father O'Malley preached in (it was one of the oldest surviving buildings in the city of Zootopia, a fact which O'Malley _never_ shut up about.)

Before Pastor Phillip could even say anything to retort, Father O'Malley was running off to who knows where else. Ever since some guy by the name of _Martin_ had dared to stick a glorified post-it-note onto a door that one time back in 1517, the Catholics and the Protestants had been at each other's throats, and although Phillip and O'Malley weren't _literally_ killing each other (as much as they _both_ wished otherwise), they nevertheless seized every spare chance to belittle, deride, infuriate, or otherwise mock each other, and had personally been doing so for over 20 years.

Stifling his rage as he accepted defeat, Pastor Phillip returned his attention to the graffiti: Plastered all over the face of the building was a burgundy silhouette of some fox with heterochromatic eyes (the artist would later confess that they'd run out of green paint, and had settled for blue). In one hand, the fox held an eviction notice, while cradling a _Globus Cruciger_ (that golden sphere with the cross on it that all the cool kids seem to be holding in their portraits) in the other. Even as a silhouette, the fox was very notably missing its collar, and even this abstracted cartoon managed to subtly disturb the pastor.

"God is as homeless as the rest of us. Mark 2:17" Read the tagline, which bordered on outright propaganda. _Edgy_ , heretical propaganda, but still.

Sighing to himself, Pastor Phillip proceeded to ignore the writing on the wall as he stepped inside, found the nearest phone, and dialed the non-emergency line.

* * *

Sometime around 10:40 AM.

"Alright, show your hands." Announced Julian. There was _a lot_ of money riding on this one.

" _Full house!_ That money's mine!" Bragged the lizard man.

"Aww hell!" Exclaimed Julian. "All I had were quintuple 9's and a joker."

"Correction: That money is _mine_." Chuckled Jeremy, much to the aghast of the reptilian overlord. "Sorry, but Royal Flush beats a full house."

Officer Hopps, who'd somehow been dealt an UNO card, a Chick Tract, an expired parking ticket, the thin strip of paper from the inside of a fortune cookie, and a natural 20, didn't even know what to say and therefore said nothing, her speech synthesis unit remaining dormant for the time being.

" _Bullshit!_ You're cheating!" said the overlord.

"And _what_ makes you think _that?_ " Jeremy feigned offense. For the record, he _was_ cheating, but still.

"Well I've been cheating this whole time, yet you're still beating me!" the overlord was understandably cross at the whole affair.

"You're one to talk-" quipped Julian, who was now intoxicated to the extent that the overlord's cloaking spell was no longer 100% effective. "-you're not even a mammal...you're, like, some reptile _thing_."

"Says the shapeshifting fox." Replied the lizard man in a classic instance of the _ad hominem_ fallacy.

"Well at least I bothered to transform! Jeremy here is nothing but a fox in a mask!" Said Julian, as he lifted the aforementioned mask in what was becoming desperation.

"Officer Hopps isn't even a life form." Said Jeremy, who correctly figured that roping Officer Hopps into this increasingly messy mess of an argument would make everybody forget about him. To punctuate the point, he knocked on Judy's steel chest as if it were a door, the hollow knocking sound distinctly audible for all to hear.

"KNOCK ONE MORE TIME AND YOU'RE UNDER ARREST." The robot seemed angry.

"Wait, you're _actually_ a cop?" Asked the overlord, who had until now assumed that like everyone else at the table (including himself), Officer Hopps was in diguise.

"AFFIRMATIVE."

"And you're participating in a _borderline illegal_ game of poker?"

"YOU CONTROL THE CITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT. THIS GAME ONLY EXISTS BECAUSE YOU PERMIT IT."

"Touché. Still, why are you even here? Aren't you lot _desperately_ searching for that what's-his-face fox guy?"

"I HAD RECEIVED A TIP THAT NICHOLAS WILDE WAS HERE."

"Aaaaaand?" Asked Julian.

"IT WOULD SEEM TO HAVE BEEN A RED HERRING."

"Well that's a relief." Actually, it wasn't relieving at all. No matter how far he ran, it became painfully clear to Julian that _they_ would never stop looking for him, so long as he lived. He'd have to fix this, and sooner rather than later.

"Well on duty or not, she's still a fucking robot." Sighed Jeremy, who had been taken completely by surprise at Judy's hostility.

"DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ABOUT THE DEALER." Deadpanned Judy in her trademark monotone voice, as she pointed at the teenager in the tye dye, who had somehow found himself here as the dealer of this patently absurd game of poker.

"OK this has gone on far enough!" Shouted the teenager in the tye dye. "I told you all to tone it down, _and now look what you've done!_ Can all of you just go the fuck away! OK? _None of this happened_ , just get out of here!"

"AFFIRMATIVE." said Officer Hopps, who was the first to leave.

"Eh, this game was winding down anyway." Said Julian, who had gotten up to follow Officer Hopps. He'd realized by now that that he'd have to nip the "everybody's looking for Nicholas Wilde" thing in the bud before he could safely go home (and hopefully before they arrested Honey).

"Go on, fuck off!" The overlord and the masked fox were proving a bit more stubborn, but they too were finally leaving.

"Excellent." Said the reptilian overlord, as he sat his ass down at a bus stop and consulted his notes. " _Everything_ is going to plan."

* * *

"Hey-" began Julian, who still wasn't quite sure if he _wanted_ to do this, even though he'd been long ago convinced that it _had_ to be done. They were now in yet another back alley, where Julian's mind was increasingly perturbed by some _very_ dark thoughts. He was relatively confident that anybody who'd be watching them here was far too guilty of something themselves to _immediately_ rat them out to the police. Oh, and he was also still in the flesh of an oryx.

"What?" Randall seemed curious.

"I...I know this will sound _weird-"_

" _Really?_ " Snarked Randall, who wasn't _completely_ self-unaware. Julian barely noticed the joke.

"-But...could you make a copy of my body? _Don't actually put me in it,_ I just need the body."

"Yes." Answered Randall. Although many would interpret Julian's question as a request, it was merely a question, and it had been answered truthfully.

"No, I mean, can you do it?"

"Yes, Julian, I can make you a puppet. Are you putting on a show?" Said Randall, who deadpanned this latest question like he was a computer receiving orders from the user. Come to think of it, that's exactly what was happening.

"No...yes...well, it's complicated, but I _will_ need the body...Please make one."

Bits flipped. Subroutines were called with modified parameters, and even more mass-energy was fed to the dysmal engine as it churned away amidst the hungry voidsharks. Never mind what the voidsharks were up to, _that's none of your concern._

As for Julian, it was like looking into a mirror. In the blink of an eye, another oryx, identical to himself in every way, was standing among them in the alley, facing him with a pair of eyes that almost seemed alive.

And considering that Randall was manipulating the states of sodium ions within this puppet's neurons, telling the heart to beat and so on, it was. Sure, its head was quite literally full of air, but it was nevertheless a living, breathing, yet utterly lifeless husk, a being so completely empty that there was not even a modicum of a brain remaining for Nurse Ratchet to lobotomize.

And then Julian moved, and the mirrored illusion was spoiled, for it did not move with him.

"No, I meant my _fox_ body."

More bits flipped. Now a little fox stood in place of the oryx, misery staining his face. Seeing what he continued to think of as himself from a third person perspective, while he remained within a body that was far taller than and still didn't quite register as his own, was a truly surreal experience, and one that was beginning to induce a headache.

"...Perfect!"

"Julian, what is the goal of this?"

"The cops are looking for a barenecked predator. Even _you_ must now that by now."

"No, Julian, they're looking for us both."

 _"..."_

"Remember that trip to get your toothbrush?"

"Right...Point is, they've known _what_ they were looking for, and now they know _who_ exactly that is. They're looking for Nicholas Wilde...they're looking for...me..." Julian was tripping over his own language, as he wondered again for the thousandth time whether or not he was still Nicholas Wilde. "And they won't stop until they find me, whatever it takes, and it won't take them long before they connect the dots and go after Honey and the others. They won't be safe, they _can't_ be until they get what they're looking for."

"So you're turning yourself in?" They were now viewing the lobby of a nearby ZPD station.

"No. I'm giving them what they're looking for: Nicholas Wilde. You still have my-" Too late he caught the Freudian slip. "... _the_ body?"

They were now back in the alley, Randall holding a small wooden cross in his left hand.

"It's a puppet, in both name and in function. You can control it with this, although I doubt your show will fool them indefinitely."

"Well, _if_ this works, it'll only have to fool them _once_...Now _how_ should I do it?"

"Julian, you're thinking like you're about to kill someone. _I can help with that._ "

Randall, who had once again donned the beige trenchcoat, was now telescopically extending his right arm to an increasingly comical length as if he were a black market arms dealer from the non-Euclidean city of R'lyeh, revealing every sort of absurd weapon there was: The impossibly vast interior of Randall's reality warping trenchcoat included an early 17th century hand-cannon, a red crowbar, the sword _Excalibur_ , a bigass sci-fi raygun that stank of sulfur and brimstone, Duke Nukem's right foot, a Davy Crockett nuclear warhead, and a bag of C-4 stolen from the purse of Georgina Sandminer. Oh, and a pair of brass knuckles, along with a couple dozen pistols, shotguns, grenades, Molotov cocktails, and a gently used brick. _Because you never know when you need a good throwing brick._

"Wait, you're _perfectly fine_ with me just killing somebody?" Julian was understandably beside himself. He'd made the mistake of thinking of Randall as merely a person with strange abilities, rather than the interface terminal of the absolutely inhuman alien supercomputer that he actually was.

"What is good? What is evil? What is murder? What counts as self defense? Does intent matter? What constitutes cannibalism? What is death? What the hell even _is_ life to begin with? On that last point especially, there are far too many unknowns and not even remotely enough universally recognized good answers for a meaningful judgement. Sure, _you_ might think you know what murder is...But what of these people here? Do they not also know? And suppose that you disagree? On what basis are you right? Too many questions, not enough answers. Now watch:"

They were now floating above a cyan ceremonial field 3 days ago and some 400 light years from home. A pastel colored yellow government building looming large in the distance, with an equally yellow line marking the center of the field. The previous batch of politicians, all 5555 naked and white as snow, marched aside the line single file, and placed their hands behind their heads. The current batch of birthmothers, fresh from the factory and black as night but otherwise identical to the politicians in most ways, marched to their places in a similar fashion on the opposite side.

At the call of a distant klaxon, the politicians sat, the birthmothers crossed the line, and everyone began furiously copulating as if the future of their civilization depended on their success. Several minutes later, the birthmothers withdrew from the embrace, and placed one of their many tentacled appendages (did I mention they weren't humanoids?) on the yellow line. One by one, red lights came on at their spots, signifying a confirmed pregnancy. 17 of the politicians, perturbed by green lights on the yellow bar, were lead away with their birthmothers by doctors in purple. Having been cursed with their species' equivalent of Erectile dysfunction, they would have to be bred via more invasive means...

The klaxon sounded again, sending for squadrons of soldiers in blue to approach the line as the birthmothers retreated to the maze of tunnels beneath their city.

The leader of the sodiers met the speaker of the legislature, both distinguished only by their golden heads.

"You have served your people well."

"Thank you sir."

"You have reached your term limits."

"That is correct."

The soldiers, starting with the guilded commander, saluted the former politicians, and took aim.

The klaxon sounded, this time accompanied by the **_BZZT!_** of 5538 rayguns discharging simultaneously. The dead politicians collapsed onto the field, the soldiers weeping as they dragged the corpses into the gaping maw of an enormous subterranean meat grinder, once again in single file.

"Well you see Julian, it's a bit like monarchy, only there's thousands of them, and instead of waiting around for their parents to die, all the kings are executed on their 317.75th birthday. Of course, the duration of their year doesn't exactly match your year, hence the decimal."

"What? Th-this is..." Julian stammered.

" _Wrong?_ No it isn't." Said Randall. "They agreed to this when they accepted their office, and it's this world's equivalent of checks and balances. Nothing deters corruption like _signing a suicide pact_ when you run for office!"

"Those...things-"

" _Oh!_ " The android mimed profound offense. "So they're not people unless they look like you? _You_ of all people should know better, Mr. Julian the _red fox_ , yet here you are trying to tell _me_ about good and evil."

Julian was now twofold speechless.

"But of course you failed, just like the devs. _And believe me, they did try._ But no matter how hard, they just could not get it to compute. Too many contradictory codes, far too much cultural context involved, and nowhere near enough spaghetti-coded black boxes to handle the conversions. So the engineers just gave up. You can't even get yourself straight on _your own_ moral code, yet you expect _me_ to have all the answers? Spoiler alert, there are none."

And now they were back in the alley, the orange canine puppet once again staring at them with his hauntingly blank eyes.

"So no, Julian, I am not concerned in the slightest with what you do with any of the guns that I am most certainly able and permitted to supply to you. Because I am not programmed to care. Because I am programmed to _not_ care. _Or do you want me exterminating half the universe over some glitch in the ethics circuits?_ The greatest atrocities in the universe were not perpetrated by uncaring sociopaths, but by crusaders who cared _way too much_ in the wrong direction, who did what they thought right. So I simply don't have _any_ of those thoughts at all. Better amoral than immoral, in my book."

Julian sighed.

"OK, fine...just...forget about it. And _no_ , I'm not trying to kill anyone."

"Then what _are_ you going to do with that puppet?"

"Well, the first thing we've got to do is get it to the top of some _really_ tall building... _and keep us hidden!_ "

They were now on the roof of the Seagrams Building, overlooking the seemingly endless edifices and streets of downtown Zootopia. Much to Julian's annoyance, his puppet was also cloaked, although he still _knew_ it was there.

"No. Uncloak the puppet, and keep _us_ hidden."

Nicholas Wilde, barenecked, crazy, and profoundly alone, now stood atop the Seagram's building. Considering what he was about to do, Julian found the longing gaze of his own empty eyes far too disturbing to tolerate any longer.

Reaching someone else's hoof out, he lowered his eyelids. Much to his horror, they stayed closed.

"Randall?"

"Yes Julian?"

"Whatever happens to...the puppet, _don't fix it_. If it dies, then let it rot."

Julian's arms felt cold, and his lips were starting to get clammy. As it was, he could barely get the words out. This whole thing just felt _wrong_ , and it only got _wronger_ the more he thought about it.

Taking hold of the cross, he directed the body to walk over and climb upon the edge of the roof, almost without thinking about what he was doing. And then it stopped, and would not move a muscle, as if it knew all too well what it was being ordered to do. Giving up on the cross, he stepped over with feet leadened by dread, and pushed.

The corpse of Nicholas Wilde went tumbling into oblivion, eternity waiting for it some 515 feet below.

And as it fell, and fell, and fell some more, Julian swore he heard it scream as it went, the puppet reaching its arm for him one last time as the lifeless husk plunged to its death.

Julian made the mistake of watching as it hit the ground, the Nicholas Wilde bursting like a melon as he impacted the concrete and made a surprisingly big mess that some poor bastard in a dead end job would have to clean up.

Julian, his mind afire with musings of suicide, collapsed onto the roof, and puked out every meal he'd eaten over the last month. As the minutes ticked on, and as the sirens drew closer, his nausea only getting worse as the abyss stared linoleum daggers into his soul.

"OK-" he wheezed, struggling to stand as he wiped the bile from his chin. "-we're done here."

* * *

A considerable amount of time later, Julian (who was back to being a fox now) was seated on a park bench, his apathy quite refreshing compared to the melodrama of faking one's death.

The newspapers had already pestered him with opportunities to indulge himself on the latest bout of printed depression, but Julian had declined. Whatever secrets or stories of misery they held, he wasn't interesting in knowing (at least, not _now_ ). Frankly, it was far more fun to try and work out the zeitgeist by careful observation and deduction than by scanning the nearest bin full of assorted garbage.

Although he _had_ pocketed a paper in order to check it when he inevitably gave up with his silly guessing game, for if he got too carried away he might never obtain the truth. But the guessing game was still fun, so he persisted. On one hand, the pop culture that now surrounded him had changed most considerably: A lot of people (especially the teenagers) were wearing _way_ too much black. The music, which frequently consisted of screeching and corrupted guitar riffs, was painful to the ears of a man who'd fallen in love with the legato stoner music of the 60's. Indeed, Julian had trouble believing that much of what he was hearing was actually recorded from a real instrument, considering how alien it all seemed to him.

and then there were the wheels. Whenever he was at this place, they were positively _obsessed_ with them. Little kits threw pairs of wheels on strings like they were some kind of fad, the aforementioned teenagers were rolling about atop strange 4-wheeled boards, and the "edgy" tweens were all busying themselves over the Sisyphean ordeal of endless spinning tops duels.

Or at least they _would_ have been endless, had they not been so rudely interrupted. The sirens sputtered and clicked, as if to disclaim "pardon the interruption" before blaring " **THERE IS AN EMERGENCY! DROP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND RUN AWAY!** " at the top of their iron lungs, the whine of the klaxons banishing every last _drachma_ of silence from the city in what amounted to a fashion that was only slightly less rude than the atom bombs that would quite literally be _melting the flesh from their bones_ in less than 110 seconds.

Off in the distance, Julian spied a little snow leopard kit seated on a bench. She dropped the gizmo she'd been fiddling with in her newfound state of panic, and ran for the nearest basement.

Julian sighed as he noted her collar's orange glare. He himself was wearing one for some reason, and the shiny gum wrapper that he'd crudely stuffed into the spark gap was little more than a hollow placebo against the swelling tide of his inescapable rage.

Considering the pricey fuel, the shiny aluminium vehicles that looked more like an aircraft than a car, the music, and the aforementioned black everything and wheel-obsession, Julian had reason enough to suspect that he was standing well within the year 20XX.

Yet when he took into account the strange (but nevertheless tape-based) VCRS he saw advertised on storefronts, the decidedly less futuristic look of some of the cars, _and the fact that they still had shock collars in this damned place_ , Julian had compelling evidence to doubt the absurd proposition that this civilization would ever escape the 20th century with any of its fingers or toes remaining, a doubt that was reinforced by the fact that the buildings (excepting the neon signs) were mostly the same, although given the fact that the Flatiron Building was still around in Julian's own time, he had to admit that this detail didn't count for much more than striking the premodern centuries off his list.

Julian, who had nothing whatsoever better to do with the ~100 seconds that remained of this city's existence, picked up the girl's Gizmo. It was a light grey plastic box, roughly the size of two Altoids tins taped together, side to side. It also seemed to be an unimaginably dull object, merely a cover for a battery compartment and a cartridge slot.

 _Tetris? What the hell is a Tetris?_

And then the gizmo beeped, and Julian realized he was holding it backwards. Flipping it over, he noted immediately that the front was very clearly defined by a plus shaped piece of grey plastic and two circular buttons. Towards the bottom there was a speaker grille, and above it all was a relatively enormous yet objectively tiny LCD screen that dominated the design of the gizmo.

Little back and white (although it would be more accurate to describe the pixels as grey and green) boxes cluttered the bottom of the screen, yet another such box in the shape of a 'T' slowly _Ticking_ down from the top.

Julian pressed his thumb upon the directional pad.

The box rotated.

Julian pressed again, and the box abruptly fell several pixels.

Sure, it was no longer a static object, but it was still rather boring.

He glanced up at the now visible ICBMs, figured that he had at least 82 seconds remaining, and returned to the gizmo. Within the landscape of boxes, there was a little T-shaped hole. In Julian's experience, the insertion of very special round pegs into similarly shaped cavities brought him immense joy, so why not?

 _T-shaped peg: meet T-shaped...HOLY SHIT WHERE ARE THE BLOCKS?!_

A devilish white hot worm of ecstasy wriggled and twisted through his head as Julian finally understand the _true_ point of the game. The blocks were all secretly members of a Lovecraftian death-cult, and wanted nothing more than to end their own miserable existence and to bring along that which passed for friends in blockland.

Julian fancied himself a merciful being, and swore to himself that he would purge the universe of _every last one of those goddamn blocks,_ starting with these ones here. So enthralled was he in his murderous quest that he hardly noticed the nuclear holocaust that went on around him, as wave after wave of ungodly hellfire atomized the city of Zootopia and melted all the leftovers into a hot, bubbling paste. Hell, he barely even registered the breeze in his fur as his collar boiled away and plunged to the floor, not at all unlike the dislocated jawbones of the corpses of Zootopia, staring oh so longingly from their lifeless eyes as they lusted after the lifeblood they would never taste again.

And so the sun had come down to the city, bringing with it the brimstone and flame that had consumed all with neither hesitation nor discrimination (excepting Julian, who was seated right at the epicenter and was therefore only mildly singed). And just as it had come, so too was it now going, the fading remnants of the city yielding to the eternal midnight. Sure, the sun would rise over the land once again, but there'd be nobody left to see it, which meant that contingent on your point of view, it might as well never rise again. At any rate, Julian could barely make out the blocks on the gizmo's screen and was forced to give up his game, gleaning the date from his now dog-eared paper with the last of the dying embers of this world.

 _1990? Wow..._

In or out of the 20th century, it hardly mattered anymore, for they were still dead anyway, having ended it all a mere 17 years into Julian's future. He powered down the gizmo and shoved it into his pocket moments before his ego gave up and faded away, just like the rest of the people who had once called this planet home. Quite some time before, Julian woke up once more in honey's basement, this time as a giant cockroach.

 _"Shit."_

* * *

 _So, what the hell even was this chapter?_ For one thing, Bellwether, her insanity, and her capricious rage have all been well and thoroughly established, and through this insanity, we have gained a better glimpse of the full extent of Randall's powers, many of which Julian has yet to stumble upon. However, as she is now an established yet temporarily irrelevant character whose very presence negatively impacts the readability for the story, we have left her alone in her asylum, and will continue to do so for a while. Besides, there are other characters to introduce, plot twists to foreshadow, obscure references to make, and red herring side-plots shenanigans to indulge.

So that's what this chapter was: Taking the surrealism in a (hopefully) new direction, introducing semi-important things, clarifying the nature of Randall's character, and exploring Julian's shattered identity as he goes through his latest attempt to keep the fuzz at bay.

And what of the Sunday school? This is a _dystopia_ , after all, and there's little point in being subtle about the systemic brainwashing, bigotry, abuse, and oppression that our characters are facing, especially not when real people in the real world have been subjected to exactly that sort of evil, _and then some_. As for Pastor Phillip specifically, you'll just have to see.

All I can say is that _big_ things are in store for these characters.

Thanks for reading, reviews are appreciated!


	9. Nowhere Man,

DISCLAIMER: This chapter contains the closest thing to an honest to god sex scene I've written so far. I haven't exactly gotten to the point of explicitly describing the reptilian overlord's thicc throbbing slimy cock kissing the priest's glorious pink puckered starfish (wait a minute... _shit_ ), but it most certainly qualifies as smut. NSFW.

Also, some parts of this chapter may make more sense if you imagine that this chapter as a whole is an episode of a cheesy, self-aware sitcom, that the characters are actors on a set, and that you are the viewer, watching all this nonsense on a TV in your living room. Basically, it shifts between 3rd person description of a film set and 2nd person narration of the viewer experience.

Thanks for reading, sorry this one took so long. Hopefully it was worth it.

* * *

You shut the door behind you, trodding across the checkerboard floor after a long and exhausting day at whatever the hell sort of job you worked at when you were an abstract, faceless being that existed in a the empty void beyond reality or even its slightly less real metaphysical counterpart. Stopping at the fridge, you removed the one and only beer can from the lower shelf, carrying it and yourself over to an old, well worn couch.

"I wonder what's on..." you say as you reach for the TV remote. It appears to be some sort of strange sitcom, and it soon peaked your interest.

* * *

Elsewhere in and/or out of reality, somewhen during The 18th of November, 1973.

"OK, am I the only one here who cares that there is _a prey_ standing in your living room?"

The audience was howling with laughter as Julian, still in the form of an Oryx, donned a sheepish grin. He looked the camera right in the eye and shrugged.

"Aaaand cue the title sequence!" shouted the reptilian overlord, who was also the director. And, as per his command, the title sequence rolled.

 _ **Zystopian Gods! Featuring:**_

The image of a mechanical mammal in a subway car now dominated the screen. **_Randall_**

A fox with sootstained fur, twiddling a cigarette as he stood with a face of pure misery in a dead end factory job. _**Julian**_

The horrendously mutilated corpse of some hooker, lying in a ditch. _**Deborah Wilker**_

A sheepish Coywolf pointing her finger and yelling about things. _**Cyrus**_

The familiar bobcat fiddling with a screwdriver as he adjusted a turbo-encabulator. _**Watson**_

A badger, frantically glancing over her shoulder, as if she feared someone had found her hoard of documents. **_Honey_**

The rabbit cop, eyes peeled and on the alert even as she failed to notice Jeremy Fischer, who drove past in a pickup truck full of Dawn Bellwether's cocaine. _**Officer Judy Hopps**_

A nightmarish dark figure with glowing red eyes, hacking Deborah Wilker into tiny bits with an oversize piece of landscaping equipment. _**C̟̣̦̬̟͓̈́ͤ̊̈́͞H̢͉̙̺͎̖̓͋̇̎A̭͖̺̣͆̾̍͆͂͋͂ͅR̴̹̘̗̻͓͕̫͕̾̀̽͋̂̂͟L̛̺̘̠̙͙͐I̶̪̯̦ͦ͊ͤ͡E̠̱ͣ̏͐͋̀̽̅̈ͪ**_

Dawn Bellwether and her multitudinous partners in insanity. _**And many more!**_

 _ **Zystopian Gods is filmed in front of a live studio audience.**_

The audience subsided as the actors got into their positions on set. "And we're live in 5, 4, 3-"

They were all staring, yet Cyrus seemed to be the only being in the house who was visibly agitated, although perhaps they were petrified out of fear. Here was a prey, in their house: Not only a witness to bare necks and contraband collar keys, but one who had no reason whatsoever to keep quiet about it. Even if they consciously _knew_ it was Julian, on a _subconscious_ level it was the most profoundly disturbing thing their paranoid minds had come across in an awfully long time.

Whatever apprehension the others may have felt, Watson, ever so logical, had seen this one coming. "And why, exactly, is this even a surprise? We've known of shapeshifting ability since day one. If I recall correctly, it was Honey who noted it first."

"Oh...I dare say he's right! It was the miraculous regeneration of your claws that initially set me off guard."

Cyrus, having long ago established herself as the most paranoid member of their little group, still wasn't buying it. "How do you know they regenerated at all? Aside from what he _says_ he remembers, we have no reason to think he's Nicholas Wilde, and _every reason, including the claws_ , to suspect that he isn't!"

"Then how could I have known of your doorknock code, or of the collar key?"

"The lizard man implanted those memories in your head! _That's how!_ "

Watson chuckled along with the audience. "And to think just a few days ago we were worried that it was _the government's_ doing. _**HA!**_ They aren't even close to being able to pull _this one_ off."

"The bobcat is right, and I assure you-" said Randall, his porcelain head and glowing eyes dangling from the ceiling like a lightbulb on a matte brown cord. "-you'd pick the government over the mainframe in a heartbeat if you knew what I could do with it."

"And what can you do?" Said Julian, still standing tall in his Oryx corpse, now with his arms crossed in a manner that a certain sleep deprived college student with a wrist mounted Trinitron choose to describe as "1990's edginess".

" _This_ , for starters!" Lightbulb Randall's head fell from its socket, plunging to the floor and shattering into dozens of tiny, razor sharp pieces as his disembodied glass eyes rolled about the room (much to the audience's amusement) like billiard balls, casting their phantom orange light from all sorts of wacky angles as their cathodes continued to glow in spite of the sudden and rather violent decomposition of the machine that had powered them.

And then they ricocheted back to where the head had impacted the floor, the broken glass spontaneously reassembling itself as one of Randall's many headless bodies climbed out of the Honey's ostensibly mid-century turquoise refrigerator. The body picked up the now reconstructed head, and screwed it on as if it were still a lightbulb (and to this end, his eyes came on like the headlights of a car upon finishing, shining even brighter than usual).

"Julian, _my friend_ , you have barely scratched the surface! Your imagination is the limit!"

And then Randall, now no more than a picture printed on a flat sheet of cardboard, fell backwards with an anticlimactic _whuff_ , the cardboard already crumpling or otherwise crumbling to dust as a small army of subatomic garbage collectors purged the floor of the contents of an address in memory that had outlived its usefulness. Now unable to contain themselves, the audience burst into laughter at Randall's truly absurd exit.

"...Well look, while you're in my house, could you please go back to being Ni-... _Julian?_ " Honey caught herself too late, once again betraying her emotional bias towards this doppelganger.

"I don't see why not, although-" the creature sighed "-I must remind you that I am not Nicholas Wilde. _Not anymore._ " Considering that this was coming from a 6 foot Oryx whose figure resembled a bent twig, this wasn't all that hard to believe. "As far as I am concerned, I... _he_...was pushed off the Seagrams Building earlier this morning, and quite frankly, his head split _like a melon_ when he hit the pavement."

"And how does that make you feel?" Watson, for once, was genuinely concerned for Julian's mental health, and wasn't just asking to refine some contrived theory of his.

"It was probably the single most profoundly disturbing thing I've had to do in a very long time. I swear I heard me-" he too caught himself too late "- _IT_ screaming as it fell."

* * *

The 19th of November, 1973.

Julian the fox ascended the steps and sat down for breakfast. Honey rarely made grits anymore, although whenever she did they were _delicious._ Usually, it being Monday and all, Nicholas Wilde would be leaving for work by now. But now Julian had other worries, and it wasn't like the factory where Nicholas had spent years slaving away for peanuts had itself been set on fire and burned to the ground or anything...

Oh wait. That's _exactly_ what had happened, as clearly demonstrated by the footage of said fire now playing on the screen, as a sort of flashback. And in this flashback, the factory was not merely burning, no, it was properly ensnared in great billowing columns of fire, as years upon years of corner cutting and grandfather clauses came back to bite its owner in the ass, or more precisely, to incinerate it. Shortly before cutting back to Julian in the townhouse, a mysterious dark figure could be seen exiting the factory.

"So, Julian: What ever _will_ you do today?" Randall was pestering Julian like an impatient child as he noisily snacked on the very peanuts Nick had slaved away for. Julian, meanwhile, ignored the mechanical fox and took a bite of his own food.

"How are you feeling, by the way?" Said Watson.

Julian sighed. "Well, I turned into a prey, tossed my own corpse off a building, and then today I woke up as a giant insect, like something ripped out of one of those weird existentialist novels. So, I suppose I could be better."

"I knew an existentialist once. She was a batshit crazy _preydophile_ who lived in a kitchen." said Watson, who at times sounded far more like a grumpy old bigot than he actually was. Like now.

Cyrus stifled her offense at Watson's remark and spoke to Julian (As a coywolf, she is the product of a something barely a stone's throw away from the very same preydophilia Watson was lambasting). "That must have been terrible."

"It probably was. I mean, you _did_ wake up a cockroach, Julian!" Randall shoved a peanut, uncracked shell and all, right into his mouth without the slightest care, noisily crunching on it as if he had a paper shredder installed in his face, rather than a mouth.

"I got better." Julian deadpanned, his remark setting off the audience like a spark contacting a powder keg. Most of the humor, of course, was contained in his tone, in his delivery, saying such a thing as if such things happened all the time.

"Oh, right." Honey went along with this notion. Compared to everything else that had happened, it wasn't terribly odd for a throwaway gag to resolve itself with no explanation given. Furthermore, she hadn't actually _seen_ the giant insect, and was therefore far less upset than she would have been if she had actually seen it. Perhaps if she had, she would've bashed his giant insectoid head in with a fire extinguisher.

"Perhaps we should fire up the X-ray again?" Julian's recent transformations had rekindled Watson's curiosity over Julian's impossible anatomy.

"And what do you hope it will reveal _now_ that it didn't the first time? Even I had no idea it was possible until Randall took my attempt at sarcasm literally."

"Wait, _he_ did this?" Honey now understood what the android fox had been getting at yesterday.

"You didn't already know? He's the one behind _all_ of my parlor tricks." Julian confessed, almost as if it were some immense guilt.

"Actually," said Randall "I'm just the interface unit."

Honey continued, as if she hadn't heard him. "So what you're saying-" She paused, searching for the right words. "-is that none of this is actually _you?_ "

"Actually you?" Randall mimed, as he began a full blown rant. "What does that _actually_ mean? What even _are_ you? Are you _this?_ " He said, pointing to Honey's cranium. "Or are you _this?_ " The android now gestured to Watson's chest cavity.

All of them, still at the table, were suddenly floating in N-dimensional hyperspace, the entire 4th dimensional light-cone of Cyrus the coywolf on display for _all_ to see: Every alternate version of the past, and every possible future thereof, constrained by the aperture of the present, chugging through the 4th dimension like a zipper.

"Or is _THIS_ you?" The audience was far too awestruck to audibly react.

The 4th dimensional light-cone quivered a bit, a narrow dark stripe on the side becoming a bit less dark and a bit wider, as if it were saying "I don't know".

They were now back in Honey's kitchen, and Cyrus was no longer an abstract depiction of a construct of relativistic physics.

"It's bad enough dealing with you when you think clearly, and now here you are, referring to a transient emergent pattern of an equally temporary pile of atoms as if it were a single, concrete thing. Never mind the fact that you lose consciousness and _scramble_ your own minds on a nightly basis! Are you the same person you were last night? Are you the same person once you unleash hellfire on the nearest toilet after consuming every _drop_ of tobasco sauce in a mexican restaurant?"

The footage briefly cut away to Nicholas Wilde doing exactly this in the year 1967.

"Oh god!" exclaimed the fox, his face contorted in gastrointestinal agony. Oddly enough, a thunderous reply made itself heard.

"Oh no, you're on your own for this one, buddy." This prompted a chuckle from the studio audience.

Randall's quasi-philisophical rant resumed. "And then you have the _gall_ to speak of these things _as if_ there is an obvious answer?! I might as well be having a conversation with the _naval fleet_ of Theseus! And _yes_ , Honey, Julian _is_ 'merely' giving orders to 'that thing'."

Randall pointed to himself in an exaggerated fashion.

"Although I must note that 'eldritch horror' is a far more appropriate word than 'thing' in this use case." It added.

Once upon a time, a teenaged Nicholas Wilde had gone through a bit of a Lovecraft phase. Cyrus, meanwhile, was a die-hard fan, and Randall's latest quip had perked both of their interests.

"You don't _seem_ all that Eldritch to me." Said the coywolf.

"Why not?" Asked Julian "He shapeshifts regularly, he bends reality on a whim, and he's teleported me halfway across the city multiple times."

" _Mere_ power is hardly the measure of an Eldritch abomination! They're unthinkable horrors who make logic their bitch. Their very existence is a crime against reality, and even looking at one is enough to drive most mortals insane. Some things _were not_ meant to be known, Eldritch horrors are those things, and they sure as hell don't sit down for grits and coffee."

"Well _sor-ry_ if I got the jargon wrong." Randall was now overacting to a near-comical extent, pointing his porcelain finger at Julian in the most accusatory manner possible. "Although the mainframe's _de facto_ definition of personhood probably still qualifies under your extended criteria, I was nevertheless I was going off the definitions in _his_ head."

"Hey, don't blame me! _You're_ the one who can read minds and see through walls and shit!" Julian exclaimed.

"Julian, we've been over this: I see _around_ walls." The audience giggled.

"And if he were an eldritch abomination" Cyrus interrupted them both "he wouldn't be able to explain it at all, at least not without driving you insane in the process."

"OK _fine!_ " Julian admitted. "I got the word wrong, and _you_ should've known better than to mis-use it like that."

" **False**. As per clause #2564a of the contract, the contents of the mind of the customer, if they pertain to a previously uncontacted civilization, is assumed to be the canonical authority on the language and culture of that civilization, unless contradicted by other evidences, testimonies, or lexicographical works." They, along with the audience, had almost allowed themselves to forget that Randall (or more specifically, the mainframe he ran on) was a cold, inhuman, and possibly eldritch machine. In recent episodes, the director, therefore, occasionally went out of his way to remind them of this fact.

"So it never occurred to you to read anybody else's mind?"

"They didn't sign the contract."

"Whatever." Julian just wanted to move on from this stupid game of semantics, in spite of its entertainment value.

"So-" Watson, having been excluded from the conversation-turned-argument, was getting rather bored. He too wanted to change the subject. "What _will_ you be doing today?"

" _Hmmm..._ " Julian mimed scheming. He already had ideas of course. _Plenty_ of ideas. But he was also well aware that Honey would not appreciate what he _really_ had in mind, so he said nothing.

* * *

Father O'Mally (who is also Italian) was lying on a pew, surrounded by a film crew as he _writhed_ in pleasure that was as illegal as it was exquisite, for he was on the receiving end of a kinky rimjob from none other than the twitching serpentine tongue of the reptilian overlord himself, whose "finale" had briefly left him speechless.

And as the green kobold had gone to great lengths to ensure that the Hays Code had never been ratified in this timeline, he most certainly _was_ allowed to pull this sort of stunt on the air. _Why?_ Because the show's ratings were falling, and sex sells.

"Yo camera guy, zoom in, will ya'?" Whispered the producer. The cameraman obliged.

"HEY!" Father O'Malley was interrupted by a sudden tremor of post-orgasmic ecstasy. "Did you know this cathedral is one of _the_ oldest-"

"Oh shut up and _bend over_." Said the lizard man as he reached under to fondle Father O'Malley's luscious ass. The audience, meanwhile, could hardly contain their awkward laughter.

All Father O'Malley could do, meanwhile, was pant in exhaustion. Reptilian mating rituals were supremely time-consuming to say the least, and the corrupted priest was loving every second of it.

The scaly mastermind paused to let the camera get one last look at O'Malley's 10/10 tailhole, before squatting down and laying his claws upon the priest's shoulders. His snout came to rest aside the priest's ear.

"To tell you the truth-" the walking serpent whispered, much the same to O'Malley as he had to a naked woman in a Garden. " _-I was there_."

And with a heave and a _thrust_ , Father O'Mally was reduced to an incoherently moaning pile of incalculably hypocritical flesh, as the live studio audience continued to stare.

* * *

Julian was on his knees, gazing upon the not-quite-brand-new Betamax player that sat beneath the TV with a sense of corrupted awe.

Sure, Honey was out of her mind, hoarding electronic knickknacks and conspiracy theories alike.

But that also meant she was one of the only people Julian knew who owned a VCR, and in 1973, no less.

He pressed the "eject" button, marveling as the tray opened as if it were a butler holding a platter. As the camera zoomed in, the tape itself (which now ate up half of your screen) was shown to be equally striking: Artsy, asymmetric, and punctuated by a single circular window not at all unlike the interface panel of that psycho computer in that trippy-ass space movie Julian had seen that one time back in '68. On that day, Nick had smuggled some LSD into the theater, and as fate would have it, it was the last time he'd gotten high with Finnick before those fucking collars came along and ruined _everything_.

Speaking of which, Julian's collar, as per the running gag, went yellow for some reason, despite not being anywhere near him or his neck. Perhaps it was a moralizing Puritan, its objections so unbearably obnoxious that since he'd put it on, Nick hadn't gotten laid _once_. Not that Nick hadn't tried, there was just no way to have decent sex with an electric demon on one's neck. Suffice it to say, the month or so after the Harmony Act went into effect had been one of the worst months of Nick's life, and now Julian was horny as hell.

In a way, Julian felt felt just a bit guilty about the whole affair, a bolt of _naughty_ excitement jolting through his flesh and awakening his little red monster as he prepared to masturbate on the shoulders of giants. Of course, the tape, the machine, and (to a lesser extent) almost everything else in the room were all immaculately clean, but it remained _filthy_ in a way, as if simply having the tape near the machine (let alone in it and _playing_ ) somehow polluted it all. It the same sort of guilt over the same sort of filth that was driven by the same sort of childish dogmatic absolutism wherein a single drop of sin was enough to literally condemn all of mammalia, forever.

Although Julian's mind, lacking in recent churchgoing and unconstrained by the black demon, was horny enough to pretend not to care, and dismissed those feelings in favor of some other feeling that had been forcibly dismissed for far too long. He reached for the power button on the TV...

"Wait a minute...this seems familiar..." A handful of the people in the audience breathed harder than normal.

Julian gripped the pelt of his left arm in his claws. After several seconds of contemplation, he pinched.

It hurt like a motherfucker. Nick had forgotten how sharp claws could get, and Julian had remembered too late for his own good. Somebody in the audience chuckled as the fox yelped in pain.

"Well, at least I'm not dreaming this time."

Having double checked that, excepting himself, the house was silent and empty, he sighed and looked yet again at the tape, pausing to read the label which had been conveniently obscured in the previous close-up.  
Satisfied that this was no hallucination, he redirected his mind back to the task at hand.

" _Plan 69 From Outer Space?_ Am I really doing this?"

And then, as the audience burst into hysterical laughter, Julian West remembered exactly how horny he was ( _very_ ).

"Yes, yes I am."

He slid the tape in, his arm still a little bit sore as he walked back over to the couch.

And then he saw it, the little grey plastic gizmo sitting on the coffee table.

"Wait, wasn't that the thing from the-"

His dick, however, was already throbbing in anticipation, and evidently had other far more important concerns. "-fuck it. Whatever that gizmo is, it can wait." it practically said.

But as much as his dick screamed, he couldn't take his mind off of the little grey video game box, and a disappointingly short amount of time later, Julian had finished, cleaned up, hidden the tape, and was now contemplating gizmo he'd stolen from the 90's.

 _What the fuck is a Tetris?_

Much to the horror of his growing curiosity, the dancing black pixels on the tiny screen were noticeably fading, the dim red LED now dangerously close to off as the pocket sized computer ran out of power. Julian flipped the switch again, briefly reviving the pixels, but they were even dimmer than before and fading out that much faster. Having realized it was futile, the fox began searching for the battery compartment, eyeing every last scuff and scratch on the grey plastic casing as he did so. As much as it fascinated him, the gizmo was actually a rather _boring_ object: Just a box, some buttons, a black plus-shaped thing, a screen, and a speaker. Nevertheless, it took him quite a while to find where the batteries were hidden, and upon doing so, Julian soon found himself prying at a small plastic panel on the back of the Gizmo.

It came off with notable lethargy, as if it were stuck, bringing to Julian's mind his memories of its original owner: A little snow leopard kit who was hardly more than 8 years old, probably with sticky pawpads to match. Nicholas Wilde had never had sticky pawpads as a kit, yet _everyone_ else he had ever spoken to on the subject did. _WHY?_

He finally got the panel open. For dramatic effect, the prop department had crammed the battery compartment full of pale green silly putty, and the actor who was currently playing Julian (as per the director's suggestion) _slowly_ pulled the cover away, allowing the goop to stretch and _droop_ downwards as he donned a face of 4th wall shattering comic horror, staring at the camera with one of those classic canine "WTF?" looks.

The audience once again burst into hysterics, and the screen faded to black, followed by garish, discordant commercials that made your eyes glaze over, prompting you to rise from your seat to obtain more snacks. By the time you returned, the show was back on, and Julian was at a loss, staring upon the now goo-free battery compartment of the strange gizmo he found in a previous episode.

" _Four_ double A batteries? I'll be damned."

He rose from the now orgasm-tainted couch and walked through the gaping void of Honey's basement, his eyes feasting upon the dramatic transition from semi-luxurious home theatre to entirely unfinished basement workshop, the latter lit by a single bluish CFL, and the former smelling faintly of butter and lavender. The two could not have been more different, yet they were right next to each other, just like the city itself had been before they'd torn down the barbed wire fence which kept Happytown segregated from everything else. Julian soon found himself a world and a half away, staring at Honey's workstation: A soldering iron, a desk, and cardboard boxes of every size and condition holding god knows what. If there were batteries to be had _anywhere_ in her townhouse, they'd be here.

His hopes were raised almost immediately at the sight of a generic brand silver AA casually placed on the desk, surrounded and partly hidden by other haphazardly placed things, including a strip of condoms (this elicited one or two naughty giggles from the audience), which Julian initially tried to ignore, and then subsequently inspected with corrupted fascination.

The camera zoomed in.

 _Magnum_.

Despite knowing better than to engage in such speculation, the fox began to wonder how big the late Mr. Badger's dick must've been... _But why would Honey keep the condoms? He bit the dust...god, has it really been a whole decade?_

"Yes." Said Randall, who barged into the shot without warning.

" _SHUDDUP!_ " Julian blurted, much to the audience's delight. _And wouldn't they be expired by now?_ "

Much to Julian's surprise, they weren't. In fact, they'd be good 'till 1976, and as he looked closer, it seemed as if these condoms were a month old, at the very most.

 _Has Honey been seeing anybody?_

"She has."

Julian was flabbergasted. "Wow. Just... _wow!_ First my dick, and now the sex lives of my friends: You really have _no_ concept of boundaries, _do you?_ "

"You're the one who asked." The pseudo-eldritch android deadpanned, in a manner that almost suggested he were trying to shirk responsibility. The audience found this quite amusing.

"Well you don't have to go about answering _every_ question, you know!" Julian responded in turn, pointing out Randall's social ineptitude.

"Then _why'd_ you bother asking?" Sure, Randall was an inhuman machine, a mechanical monster who could bulldoze the Seagrams Building with the snap of a finger, _but at least he could quip like the rest of us_. This was, of course, the only reason why he was on the set at all, because a certain longhaired _somebody_ in a boardroom with a trinitron for a wristwatch thought his antics amusing.

"...Can you at least tell me who she's screwing?" Julian sighed, amusing the audience with his cognitive dissonance for the umpteenth time.

"Well well well, Mr. _Boundaries_ wants to know who _banged_ the badger." Randall chuckled for but only a moment before continuing. "I knew you were split minds, but _come on!_ I haven't seen hypocrisy this _thick_ in ages! Might as well define Earth as "home of the hypocritical". Because you, _and everyone else for that matter_ , are positively _drowning_ in it!"

Now it was Julian's turn on the soapbox. "Oh you think _I'm_ hypocritical? Tell that to the mayor! Tell that to the president! Hell, tell that to the _bastards_ that designed the fucking collars!"

As a much needed piece of comic relief, Julian's collar went yellow, even though he wasn't wearing it, and was nowhere near it. His performance as a side character would go on to win him an Emmy at this year's award ceremony.

Randall stooped forward, placing his hands on his knees as he literally brought his head down to Julian's level. " _Tu quoque._ "

"What?"

" _Tu quoque_. You too, in Latin. Their assholery doesn't make _you_ any less of a hypocrite." Randall's cynicism intensified.

"And why do you care?!" Julian was now considerably frustrated.

The overgrown fennec with the nixie tube eyes stood back up. "Because _I'm_ the one who has to make sense of all your nonsense! And now, I not only have to translate your borderline incoherent thoughts into executable code, but I also have to work out which lines you want the compiler to ignore, _and without even so much as a comment operator from you?!_ There was once a planet, far, far from here, that taught _precision_ of language as one of its core values. You'd be doing us both a favor by learning from their example (up 'till they blew themselves up, that is)"

"Now why the hell are you being so snarky all of a sudden?"

"You seem to respond better to it, considering how _all_ of your friends over the last 20 years have acted."

"And where have you been all this time? Pouring over my scrapbooks or something?"

"Julian, the I have random access to time, not just space."

"Whatever." These were by no means the first incomprehensible strings of technical jargon that had sailed right over Julian's head, nor would it be the last.

" _Huh._ " This latest nonchalant remark pushed the fox over the edge, his slowly crumpling face of unadulterated rage sending the audience into hysterics as the camera zoomed in.

"You know what, why don't you just _shut up?!_ Just go back to being the soulless robot that never talks back! or better yet, give me one of those _computer_ terminal thingies or whatever and _get lost!_ "

Randall almost seemed hurt. "Fine. Fine. However, I _must_ warn you: I am the customer interface-"

"Yeah, I get it." Julian was getting tired of Randall.

"NO. YOU. DON'T." Randall was suddenly frighteningly loud, his thunderous voice sounding more like an air raid siren than the slightly upset fox he had been pretending to be up to this point. " _ **I**_ am _not_ the mainframe itself. I am _merely_ the interface unit. I interpret your commands and pass the executables along to the computer itself, which actually makes the vapid depravities in your head a reality. Until now, you have been accessing that machine through me, but that's all over now. Now you've got _direct access_ to the machine itself, and I won't be here to save you if you accidentally divide _your entire star cluster_ by 0."

A generic beige box appeared atop Honey's desk, a basic monochrome CRT monitor appearing atop the computer. It was a _very_ simplistic unit, just a keyboard, a floppy drive, and a screen. Although the mainframe had blueprints for far more advanced computers stored in its memory banks, Julian hadn't asked for any of them: he'd asked for a _terminal_ , a dumb little thing that displayed text and accepted commands.

"Sure, you're not even halfway through the tutorial, but _whatever_ -"

4 stacks of books, each stack of 2-inch thick books over a meter high, appeared in a neat square between the couch and the television.

"-diddle around with the source code. Go right ahead: _Blow out the sun for all I care_. There's the documentation, for reference."

And then Randall was gone, finally leaving Julian alone to resume his search for batteries. The audience was stunned.

* * *

The screen faded from black, revealing Officer Hopps, out of uniform and in disguise, who was nonchalantly leaning against a telephone pole as she stared across the street at an especially dark and conspicuous alley. They'd gotten a tip that a _big_ drug deal was about to go down, and Hopps was hoping she could catch them in the act. Although mid afternoon on a Monday wasn't quite so busy as midday Saturday, there were nevertheless quite a few extras on set today. Her tranfixion was abruptly disturbed by a hiccuping revving sound that was as angry as it was distant. Moments later, a stampeding herd of sheep with _very_ bad haircuts (and irritated, bleeding skin to boot) appeared, desperately fleeing a dark grey canine with pitch black circular shades, an even blacker trenchcoat, and a filthy weedwhacker, its tongue almost lolling out of it's mouth as it lackadaisically chased its victims. For comedic effect, one of them was on fire.

A lamb tripped, and the shadowy being pounced upon her, hacking away at the wool with his weedwhacker. (not the flaming one, of course. She was merely a sight gag, and was only supposed to be on screen for 1 second at most)

Judy was beside herself, her jaw so low that it had burrowed six feet under and was currently in conversation with Jimmy Hoffa. The lamb's screams snapped her out of her trance, her senses abruptly flooding back to her like a speeding locomotive smashing into a little fox, thousands of tons of moving steel crushing his lithe form beneath its thundering wheels.

"Stop in the name of the law!"

The canine's head swiveled like he were an owl, revealing a face that was positively _plastered_ with poorly applied red war-paint. Repeatedly thrusting his tongue from his lips as if he were a cartoon woodpecker (or perhaps a snake), the dark grey creature mocked the bunny cop relentlessly.

"CaTCh HiM iF yOU CAn!"

And then he was off, the camera cutting to footage of his stunt double running through the city, throwing bricks through windows as he went. Spying a slightly beat up, red 1960's convertible, the dark figure stopped on a dime, tossed the driver (a moose) out of the car and into an almost graceful and alarmingly tall ballistic arc, the unfortunate moose's antlers shattering like glass upon hitting the ground from 15 meters in the air. Meanwhile, the convertible sped off (the driver wearing no seatbelt, of course), weaving past oncoming traffic, running lights, and generally driving like a maniac as it sprayed mammals with white paint from a squirt gun in his left hand.

Spying some good-for-nothing beaver asshole who wasn't paying attention, our mysterious mischievous man was suddenty overwhelmed by decades of repressed rage. His ears literally shrieked like the whistle of a steam locomotive, while billowing orange flames poured from his eye sockets. The next thing the poor cud-chewer knew, a red convertible was charging for him, and he barely managed to swerve out of its way as the now empty car plowed into a nearby storefront, the smell of spilt gasoline already saturating the air.

"Ugh." said the beaver, turning to the camera. " _Mondays_ "

The audience burst into laughter, which only intensified as the car burst into flames.

* * *

Much to Julian's annoyance, there were a grand total of 3 AA batteries in Honey's house.

He'd found C batteries in the drawer, but no AA's.

He'd found another porno tape, and was at this point forced to confront the fact that his childhood friend and longtime companion was also a sexual being who _really_ had a thing for girthy dicks, but no batteries.

He'd stumbled across a strange device consisting of a pair of conical objects linked by a pushrod and some elastic bands, but no batteries.

He'd found a half-finished zip gun, and even some ammunition, but no batteries.

Hell, he'd even found the severed head of a BLU spy in her freezer, prompting laughter so contagious that even the cameraman giggled. As the audience died down, Julian and the severed head quite awkwardly stared at each other for several seconds.

" _Kill me_." It begged.

"Later." The fox sighed.

But still no _fucking_ batteries.

His collar went yellow, snickering as it once again clung to his neck like a cancerous tumor, generating an endless stream of terrible pain. Now he was out and about, wandering the city as he looked for the nearest store. He'd been getting used to cervine enormity, and returning to a fox's perspective (and social status) was proving to be quite a jarring downgrade (it was also quite a difficult state of mind for the actor to portray). That being said, his hearing was _far_ sharper as a fox, although the kobold in the director's chair saw fit to show that this too had its drawbacks.

"Sweetie, I told you to stay away from those _savages_."

A dipshit giraffe was nudging his daughter to stay away from the fox, as if he posed a meaningful threat to her. Never mind the fact that even as a toddler (and one fresh out of diapers, no less), she was already taller than Julian, who tried to stifle his annoyance and carry on. Yet even as a little fox in a forest of mammals, he arguably qualified as the exact opposite of unnoticed. It was bad enough that just about everybody within 10 meters staring, yet it was even worse that not _one_ of them was actually staring at _him_ , but rather the one little one little amber lightbulb on his neck. Because as far as they were concerned, Julian the fox was no more than a walking, talking, amber lamp.

Professor J. Lumen Lightly would've been _so_ proud.

 _By god_ did Julian hate this place! The city, the Radio Shack, _all of it!_ He hated every last square micron of this shithole! He hated the cud chewing asshats who could never bother to eat with their mouths closed, he hated the beady-eyed rodent motherfuckers what with their faces all impossible to read, and oh _boy_ did he _**really**_ hate those anal retentive buck-toothed assholes who seemed to be in charge of literally everything in this goddamn city. (Unlike Honey, Nick had preferred to blame the beavers for all his ills, and Julian was beginning to pick up on this habit) He also _twofold_ despised the sheep, both for their _horizontal_ pupils that made 'em look like they were escapees from Cliffside, and for all that fucking wool they always seemed to grow, the very sort of deliberately obtrusive thing that trapped sweat, was never washed, and stank up the whole room like rotting garbage (but of course _they_ never smelled it, as was to be expected from noseblind plebeians), while simultaneously violating _everyone's_ personal space.

Yet _you_ were the asshole if you so much as accidentally touched it while some dickhead was _imposing_ himself upon you.

Forget touching it, what the little mischievous voice in Julian's head _really_ wanted to do was to take a big piece of landscaping equipment and-

 _ **BZZZZT!**_

Everyone in the electronics store (and the the audience) visibly flinched, some of the extras going so far as to take _multiple_ steps away from the all too troublesome orange canine.

Julian shifted his focus away from grotesque revenge fantasies and combed the aisles for batteries.

AAA? All here on the shelf.

9-volt? Several brands hung in the aisles.

D cells? All wrapped in that same fucking clamshell packaging shit that requires _scissors_ to open.

Hell, there was even some oldster armadillo buying replacement batteries for his hearing aids. Julian's canine nose was getting far too much of the old fart's _used condom_ body odor for his tastes, especially now that he had, for a time, smelled the world in far less detail through something else's nasal cavity. And much like the rest of his existence as an inner-city predator, he was beginning to hate it too.

Oh who are we kidding? The self-loathing train had left the station an awfully long time ago.

"AHA!" Said Julian, his face lighting up with anticipation now that he had finally found the correct shelf. Unfortunately, as revealed when the camera panned to the right and zoomed out, the entire region of the shelf was positively empty: Not _one_ AA battery in sight. The sight of the empty shelf sent the studio audience into schadenfreudic giggling, which persisted right up to the commercial break.

Several minutes (and a trip to the bathroom) later, you were once again seated upon your chair, Julian once again onscreen: standing in front of an _empty_ shelf and positively at a loss as to what to do next.

"Oh what a travesty, I swear to thee!" Julian knew that voice.

"Oh what in the name of The Father, The Son, The Virgin, and even _The Cousin of The Virgin's Half-Brother's Bastard Child_ , has happened here?" It was Jeremy _fucking_ Fischer.

The fox's collar beeped _again_ , drawing the attention of the manager.

" _All the batteries are GONE!_ "

"Hey-" said the fatass chipmunk (his cheeks stuffed, of course) with the passive-aggressive tone of voice reserved for the exclusive use of those who were well _and truly_ full of themselves "-why don't you go savage somewhere else?"

"ooooo" mused the audience.

Jeremy Fischer pretended to desperately search the store, looking high and low while revealing a basked held behind his back to the camera.

It was full of AA batteries.

"I wonder-" mused the living fairytale character "-oh gee I _do_ wonder? Who took the batteries?"

Jeremy Fischer ran for the hills, taking _all_ of the batteries with him.

 _ **BZZZZT!**_

"oooooohh!" exclaimed the audience, as if they were expecting the protagonist to _snap!_ at any moment.

"GET OUT OF MY STORE!" Half of the chipmunk's food had been spat into the floor by now.

The camera zoomed in on Julian's face. He looked like he wanted to- No. He did not look like he _wanted_ to kill someone. He looked like he _was currently_ murdering somebody, by hacking that somebody to itty bitty bits, no less.

Julian's hand was rising for the black demon. It knew what was coming, and shocked him again, which only made him scowl that much harder as he clenched his fist 'round the shocker unit. It was now beeping hysterically, as if it were a damsel under considerable duress, Julian's fingers playing the "monsters" as they pried at the infernal contraption from all sides, pulling, prodding, and squeezing 'till at last his fist slammed shut, crushing the shocker unit to tiny shards of plastic and silicon in his hand. He ripped what was left of the collar from his neck and thrust it for the linoleum floor, repeatedly stomping on it with a literally thunderous racket, like he were some sort of cartoon character. For good measure, a pair of 357 Magnums materialized in his hands (along with a much needed _lit_ cigarette for his mouth), and he preceded to pump the damn thing full of lead, the spent brass singing as it bounced off the floor of the soundstage, the flares from his guns outshining even the theatrical lighting, as if Thor himself had descended to Earth to atomize this electric abomination.

It was music to his ears, Julian now smiling like a demon (complete with impossibly pointed ears, greasy fur, and amber eyes) as he turned the entire cigarette to ash in a single drag.

And then he let go, sighing in utter ecstasy as a great burst of unholy fire leapt from his mouth. It was all _so_ clear now!

The fox, who everyone else currently regarded as a non-metaphorical demon, proceeded to shove a 9-volt battery into the GameBoy's battery compartment, and left. The GameBoy knew better than to protest.

* * *

Above a gutter, overflowing with slime.

Amidst the bricks, entombed in their monoliths to the end of time.

Between the buildings, in alleys filled to the brim with crime.

Atop a trashcan covered in grime sat a fox, gazing upon his gizmo as the rest of the world marched on.

Doomed to die, closer and closer with every passing second.

As for the fox, he was consumed with something else alltogether.

Pixel by pixel, the grey brick descended, slipping between its neighbors as it did so. The row was now complete, and the blocks flashed, rejoicing in their imminent demise. They were blocks of the Lovecraftian sort, cultists that gathered to worship the player, who'd descend from the 3rd dimension to rescue them all from the agony of existence.

This was a duty that Nicholas Wilde was happy to fulfill. So happy, in fact, that he was downright obsessed with their plight: Hurriedly ushering them along to their deaths.

Even as the sirens echoed in his ears, he could hardly be bothered.

Even as the police arrived, the fox was incapable of peeling his eyes off the screen. It was a word all its own, and he was its ruler.

"YOU'RE UNDER ARREST, SAVAGE!"

* * *

The camera now gazed upon a dark interrogation cell, a lone spotlight illuminating a table and an equally lonely chair, signifying a dramatic and outright drastic change in tone. Some time later, a scrawny ocelot entered the shot and quite literally climbed onto the chair. His left hand bore a faint paint stain.

"What the hell happened? _What the hell happened?_ Do ya' think I wasn't asking that after what I saw?"

The ocelot paused to contemplate the matter, before he abruptly paused the tape recorder on the table.

"OK Look, I'm s'posed to tell you he went _savage_ , or whatever. That somehow, this _thin_ _g_ , and it sure as hell wasn't a fox, that it could break out of a ZPD station, _unassisted_. Fattest load of _shit_ I ever heard. But that's what I'm supposed to tell you. Now you wanna' hear that made up crap, or do you actually want to know what happened?"

...

" _FUCK YOU I KNOW WHAT I SAW!_ " The ocelot was now standing, having slapped the table in frustration. The camera had followed his face. "Show me your goddamn papers all you want, won't change a damn thing! Not. A. Damn. Thing. Not unless you got another fox who can levitate the bricks in that there briefcase of yours, anyway." The ocelot sat back down.

...

"Ya' say that like it's a joke, for all I know, that thing _was_ the messiah! Now you wanna' know what _I saw_ or not?"

...

The ocelot pressed a button, the tape deck now recording once again.

"Arright, where to begin...So I'd just been hauled in for some trumped-up bullshit. I mean I was just sittin' there, minding my business in the shitty little _closet_ I call a home, watching the usual crap they put on TV. I don't really _like_ it all that much, hell I feel kinda' guilty just leaving it on at all, 'cuz it's all _lies_ , only there ain't nothing else to do 'round here, you know?"

"Next thing I know, the fuzz are pounding on my door, and they toss me into the slammer. So I'm just sittin' there, waiting for a goddamn _death sentence_ or whatever. That's how my kid brother Johnny went, No kiddin'. Jus' one day, outta' the blue, the fuzz show up, you know, and they take him away. Not even _a week_ later, every single goddamn channel's playing my kid brother's _ee-lec-tro-cu-tion_ on live TV. Ain't nothin' like seeing big brother Johnny _explode_ 'cuz they forgot to switch ol' Sparky from _elephant_ to _ocelot_. Closed casket? How 'bout closed _tin can_? Because that's all we had left to bury."

"Where was I again? Oh, _right_ , so I was sittin' there, waiting to die. Same sorta' shit we do every day, only this time it's in a cold concrete cell _without_ a TV. And then this guy shows up. It's real funny, you know: They think he's so _dangerous_ that they put 'dis guy in _two_ collars and a straitjacket, yet he's still such a _squeak_ that the cop can single-handedly _throw_ him into the cell. Don't make much sense to me. None of this shit does."

...

"The hell you lookin' at _me_ like that for?"

...

"Well of course _I_ can call the squeak a _squeak_. It's sorta' how these things work: I can say to him, I can say: "Nice landing, pipsqueak." and he can say somethin' back, something like: "You better watch your mouth _shorty_ ". But if _you_ come along an' say that shit, the hell am I supposed to say back? Huh? Am I supposed to say "Watch it, tall-guy?" Doesn't really _work_ now, does it? Hell, for all I know your balls are the size of my head. Of course they are. They _always_ are. ZPD only ever hire the big mammals. Unless it's that Officer Hopps, but she got _other advantages_ goin' for her."

...

"Well look, I ain't one of them _preydophiles_ ya' see them talk about on the TV, but even I'd like to stick my little squeaker right up her bun, know what I'm saying? But as far as its already gotten her, even the be-hind of Christ himself won't save her from bein' crushed to death by her own colleagues, 'specially that uppity zebra guy she's always patrolling with. Ya' better tell her to watch out, you know, 'cuz she'll be stepped on _long_ before she gets shot, believe me, 'cuz any thug dumb enough to pull the trigger on _that_ fine ass sure as hell won't be getting some any time soon. It's like with them hookers, you know. You fuck with one, and suddenly none of them'll even touch you. It's like they're _psychic_. Or at least that's what I've heard. I only done it once, what with these collars and all, and it wasn't even worth the trouble."

...

"So there I was, in the slammer, and this guy, he was bawlin' his eyes out. I dunno how he was able to do it for so long, 'cuz his collars were all flashing like a fuckin' disco ball. It was like that time with my friend Jimmy John, when his momma' flushed his entire stash of crack. They was cryin' the same, this fox and Jimmy John, only the fox was a thousand times worse. And then he stops, he passes out, and his collars go green. Or at least I think he passed out, 'till he turns and stares me right in the eye. And then he flashed this _grin,_ and I swear I heard his face cracking _like glass_ as he did it, but he was flashin' me this _grin_. Scared the living daylights outta' me. Next thing I know his collars are all red again, and he starts rearranging the bricks!"

...

"I dunno' know how the hell he did it! I mean this is the kind of made up shit you only see on TV, 'cuz he was just pullin' the bricks right out of the wall. And what's more, he was _floating_ 'em around like they was leaves in the breeze, and I was all trapped in a thunderstorm of bricks or something. An' at this point, I was more concerned with not getting my head bashed in by these things than I was with watching him do this crap, until suddenly, it's all gone! The bars were lying about in the hallway like one of them drunk bastards, passed out on the floor, and this, this so-called fox, this _whatever the hell he was_ , he was nowhere to be seen!"

...

"What?"

...

"You serious?"

...

"You telling me I can just get up an' leave?"

(a hand which did _not_ belong to the ocelot reached for the tape recorder and pressed the PAUSE button, as if to say "yes".)

"Well, uh, thanks, I guess?"

And then the ocelot was gone, eager to get out of the ZPD station before they changed their minds). Emerging from the station, he found himself once again on the streets as he reached for the flyer he'd stuffed in his jacket. Spotting the address, his urbanite mind was already hard at work figuring out how to get from wherever the little cat thought he was to where he thought he was supposed to go to. Never mind if he was actually there, he'd figure it out as he went, and after but a second's pause, he was once again running off. When he'd described the fox in messianic terms, he hadn't been kidding, and if this flyer was sincere, he may not have been the only one to reach that conclusion.

* * *

The fox stood in the evidence room, holding his precious gizmo with a sense of awe.

Having acquired his gameboy, he zoned in and hyperfocused on the dancing pixels that almost floated within the pale green dot-matrix screen.

A pair of guards were shooting him now, and Julian was most perturbed by their presence.

By the time the third guard arrived, the others were gone.

Julian, his toes sinking slightly into the pre-dawn sands of the world that had been burnt to a crisp by atomic hellfire in chapter 4, found himself adjacent to a white object that was probably some kind of large, alien skull.

"What the hell did _you_ do?!"

And then they both dropped dead, dismissed without even so much as a glance as Julian rested his ass on the skull and resumed his game, grinning ear to ear like Dawn Bellwether as his addiction spiraled out of control.

The sun rose, the desert now swamped by cronenberg-esque abominations which were driven away by truck-driving savages clad only in radioactive loincloths and cadmium red war paint.

And still he kept on playing his game.

High noon came and went, a swarm of locusts blacking out the sun and picking the flesh from his bones.

And still Julian sat on his skull, now surrounded by several corpses of his that had dropped dead from exhaustion.

The sun set, and excepting the frantic beeping of the gameboy, and the chuckling of the shapeshifting lizard man who had been sent here by the Illuminati to spy on him, the world had fallen silent.

Then the gameboy broke.

Julian ran for the hills, screaming "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh T'trhs R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." as he went.

"Excellent!" said the reptilian overlord. "Everything is going to plan."

The camera zoomed out on the overlord in the alien desert.

You, the viewer in the void, still seated on your couch outside of reality, were momentarily speechless.

The episode then cut to a trailer for the season finale: an out of focus figure in an alley, as he prepared to duel a rather unkempt looking sheep to the death.

You shoved yet another fistful of popcorn into your mouth. The eldritch horror in your refrigerator who had gifted you this snack had also made you swear to a pact of secrecy, so as for exactly where or when you had received the popcorn, or precisely which eldritch horror it was who had given it to you, you were not at liberty to say. Even in spite of the undeniably delicious popcorn, the grin on your face was collapsing to a subtle frown as your expectations were subsequently dashed. The showdown on screen had concluded _far_ too quickly for your tastes, and now the cops were arriving on-screen, the victor having been thoroughly soaked in the loser's blood.

You, ever the discerning television viewer, subconsciously reached for your revolver.

"Eh. This show ain't no good." With a squeeze of your trigger and the shot of your gun, you finally brought this chapter to a rather abrupt end.


End file.
